Introduction
I recently cleared SAA-CO3 which was updated by AWS last Aug 30, 2022. The exam update comprises of increased enterprise demand for optimizations in fast-changing areas such as security, resiliency, data volume, cost optimization, and the design of high-performance systems by AWS Certification and Training
The exam still consist of 65 questions with 15 unknown unscored questions to be used by AWS for performance evaluation and as a future question, in short 50 questions is the total scored questions. Target takers of this exam may be a developer or architect interested in using AWS services.
Preparation
To prepare for this challenging certification, I highly recommend to take the course of Stephane Maarek below:
This course primarily focuses in the certification questions. He also showed different diagrams that can help you familiarize different AWS architectures (combination of AWS services and how they work). If you want a full practice exam to maximize your chance in passing the exam, you can check out the course below:
Recommendation style for studying this course
This exam is a challenging one and you need time for you to have a better grasp of different AWS services and how they connect to each other. I finished studying the course in a month also spent reading twice the course material for better understanding. To do this I did the following:
- Spent ~1-2 hours of studying each day
- Go back to a specific chapter where you have confusion with
- Give yourself a break to absorb the knowledge of each chapter
- Don't forget to have a good sleep before studying!
Exam Proper Experience
The exam last for 2 hours 10 minutes but you can extend for another 30 minutes if you are a Non-English native speaker by applying ESL in the AWS certification website. The content of the exam showed on my end focuses mostly in the following topics.
- IAM and Security Groups
- AWS KMS, AWS Server-side Encryption and Server-side Encryption - Customer Managed
- VPC
- VPC Peering
- VPC Endpoints
- S3
- Storage Classes
- Static Website Hosting
- Cross-region/Same-region replication
- EC2 Instances
- EC2 Instances Purchasing Options
- CloudFront
- S3 Origin Access Identity
- Global Accelerator
- AWS Rekognition, Comprehend and Comprehend Medical
- AWS Lambda with combination of AWS Application-Load Balancer and AWS WAF
- AWS Network Load Balancer
- API Gateway
- AWS Shield Standard and Advanced
- CloudWatch, CloudTrail and Amazon Eventbridge
- RDS Databases (Mostly MySQL) and DynamoDB
- Aurora Database
- Elasticache and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
- Amazon Kinesis Data streams and Data Firehose
The point of the exam is to use the above services with the following domains in this link: AWS Solutions Architect Exam Guide
- Design Secure Architectures
- Design Resilient Architectures
- Design High-Performing Architectures
- Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Final thoughts
The exam needs to have a good preparation for you to pass as this was designed for the candidate to fail. Having a thorough understanding of the services and some practice gives you an edge to pass the exam. Fortunately, AWS preparation courses are available on the internet and gives you a higher chance to pass.