AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Complete

Pass the AWS SAA-C03 exam by mastering every in-scope service and all four exam domains: designing secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized AWS architectures

19 sections · 65 lessons

Course outline

AWS Foundations & Global Infrastructure

  1. AWS Global Infrastructure: Regions, AZs, Edge Locations, and Shared Responsibility
  2. IAM Core Concepts: Users, Groups, Roles, and Policies
  3. IAM Advanced: Cross-Account Access, STS, and Identity Federation
  4. AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and Multi-Account Strategy

Compute: EC2 and Auto Scaling

  1. EC2 Instance Types, Purchase Options, and Placement Groups
  2. EC2 Storage: EBS Volumes, Instance Store, and EBS Snapshots
  3. EC2 Networking: Security Groups, NACLs, Elastic IPs, and ENIs
  4. Auto Scaling Groups: Policies, Launch Templates, and Lifecycle Hooks
  5. Elastic Load Balancing: ALB, NLB, GWLB, and CLB

Compute: Serverless, Containers, and PaaS

  1. AWS Lambda: Functions, Triggers, Concurrency, and VPC Integration
  2. ECS, Fargate, ECR, ECS Anywhere, and EKS
  3. Elastic Beanstalk, App Runner, Batch, and Serverless Application Repository

Storage: S3 and Glacier

  1. S3 Core Concepts: Buckets, Objects, Versioning, and Replication
  2. S3 Storage Classes and Lifecycle Policies
  3. S3 Security: Bucket Policies, ACLs, Pre-signed URLs, and Encryption
  4. S3 Advanced: Event Notifications, Batch Operations, and Performance

Storage: File, Hybrid, and Backup

  1. Amazon EFS: Elastic File System for Shared Linux Storage
  2. Amazon FSx: Windows, Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, and OpenZFS
  3. AWS Storage Gateway and AWS Backup

Networking: VPC Deep Dive

  1. VPC Fundamentals: Subnets, Route Tables, IGW, and NAT
  2. VPC Connectivity: Peering, Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site VPN, Client VPN, and Direct Connect
  3. VPC Endpoints and AWS PrivateLink
  4. Network Security: Security Groups, NACLs, WAF, Shield, Network Firewall
  5. Route 53: DNS, Routing Policies, and Health Checks

Databases: Core Services

  1. RDS: Relational Databases, Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and Backups
  2. Amazon Aurora: Architecture, Serverless, and Global Database
  3. DynamoDB: Keys, Indexes, Streams, DAX, and Global Tables
  4. ElastiCache, MemoryDB, and Caching Strategies

Databases: Purpose-Built and Analytics Stores

  1. Amazon Redshift: Data Warehouse and Redshift Spectrum
  2. Purpose-Built Databases: Neptune, DocumentDB, QLDB, Timestream, and Keyspaces

Security and Compliance

  1. AWS KMS: Key Types, Key Policies, and Envelope Encryption
  2. Secrets Manager, Systems Manager Parameter Store, and ACM
  3. Threat Detection and Security Monitoring: GuardDuty, Macie, Inspector, Detective, Security Hub
  4. CloudTrail, AWS Config, and Governance

Infrastructure as Code and Management

  1. AWS CloudFormation: Templates, Stacks, StackSets, and Drift Detection
  2. AWS Systems Manager: Session Manager, Parameter Store, Patch Manager, and Automation
  3. AWS Service Catalog, Health Dashboard, Compute Optimizer, and Systems Management Tools

Monitoring, Logging, and Observability

  1. CloudWatch: Metrics, Alarms, Logs, Dashboards, and Insights
  2. AWS X-Ray, EventBridge, and CloudWatch Evidently

Application Integration and Decoupling

  1. SQS: Standard vs FIFO, Visibility Timeout, DLQ, and Long Polling
  2. SNS: Topics, Subscriptions, Fan-out Pattern, and FIFO
  3. Kinesis: Data Streams, Data Firehose, and Data Analytics
  4. Amazon MSK: Managed Kafka and AppSync: Managed GraphQL
  5. Step Functions, Amazon MQ, and AppFlow

Content Delivery, API Management, and Frontend

  1. Amazon CloudFront: Distributions, Caching, and Security
  2. Amazon API Gateway: REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs
  3. Amazon Cognito: User Pools and Identity Pools
  4. AWS Amplify, AWS Device Farm, and Media Services

Migration and Transfer

  1. AWS Snow Family: Snowcone, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile
  2. Database Migration Service (DMS) and Schema Conversion Tool (SCT)
  3. DataSync, Transfer Family, and Application Migration Service

Analytics and Big Data

  1. Athena, Glue, Lake Formation, and Data Exchange
  2. OpenSearch, EMR, Redshift Spectrum, and QuickSight

Machine Learning Services for Architects

  1. ML Services: Rekognition, Comprehend, Textract, Transcribe, and Translate
  2. ML Services: Polly, Lex, Kendra, Rekognition, and SageMaker AI

High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Resilient Architectures

  1. HA Patterns: Multi-AZ vs Multi-Region, RTO/RPO, and DR Strategies
  2. AWS Global Accelerator, Fault Injection, and Resilience Best Practices
  3. Decoupling Architectures: Queues, Buffers, and Async Patterns

Cost Optimization

  1. EC2 Cost Optimization: Spot, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans
  2. Storage and Database Cost Optimization
  3. Cost Management Tools: Cost Explorer, Budgets, Trusted Advisor, and Compute Optimizer

Well-Architected Framework and Exam Strategy

  1. AWS Well-Architected Framework: 6 Pillars
  2. Architectural Patterns: 3-Tier, Microservices, Serverless, and Event-Driven
  3. SAA-C03 Exam Format, Question Strategy, and Common Traps
  4. Must-Know Services Rapid Review and High-Frequency Scenarios

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