After about 3 months of preparation, I passed the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) certification with a score of 846. In this post, I share my study strategy, the practice exams I used, and the key lessons I learned throughout the journey.
I have over five years of experience working with DevOps, platform engineering, and related areas. Since most of this experience has been focused on AWS, it was my natural starting point for this exam. Additionally, earning the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification in 2023 gave me a good understanding of the exam format and the online testing experience.
The Exam
For the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate, the exam level is significantly more challenging than the AWS Cloud Practitioner. The questions are focused on technical and architectural details, especially involving trade-offs and decisions that best fit the problem statement.
The exam is structured around four main domains:
- Design secure architectures;
- Design resilient architectures;
- Design high-performing architectures;
- Design cost-optimized architectures.
Understanding these four domains is essential for achieving a good result. From there, it is necessary to dive deeper into specific AWS services that support these architectural designs.
Preparation
My total preparation time was around 3 months. I initially took Andre Iacono’s course, which was helpful at the beginning, especially for EC2 and S3, but overall felt outdated in other areas.
After that, I switched to Stephane Maarek’s course, which I highly recommend. It is more aligned with the exam level, more comprehensive, covers a broader range of services, and provides detailed explanations of architectural layers.
I also found it important to revisit fundamental computer science concepts such as networking protocols, DNS resolution, Auto Scaling, elasticity, and cloud computing concepts like PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS.
Practice Exams
The most important part of my preparation was doing practice exams. The actual exam consists of 65 questions, of which 50 are scored and 15 are unscored. These unscored questions are used by AWS for testing purposes.
The passing score is 720 on a scale from 100 to 1,000. This is not a simple percentage-based system, as AWS uses a scaled scoring model. As a practical benchmark, I aimed to consistently score above 72 percent on practice exams.
Stephane Maarek Practice Exams
These are widely considered by the community to be harder than the real exam.
| Exam | Score |
|---|---|
| 1 | 72% |
| 2 | 69% |
| 3 | 76% |
| 4 | 66% |
| 5 | 73% |
| 6 | 73% |
| Average | 71.5% |
This average is slightly below the ideal target, but still consistent with the expected difficulty level.
Andre Iacono Practice Exams
| Exam | Score |
|---|---|
| 1 | 78% |
| 2 | 81% |
| Average | 79.5% |
These felt easier compared to the actual exam.
Tutorials Dojo is one of the most highly rated platforms for practice exams. I completed all 7 exams with the following results:
| Exam | Score |
|---|---|
| 1 | 69.64% |
| 2 | 71.42% |
| 3 | 73.08% |
| 4 | 78.57% |
| 5 | 88.68% |
| 6 | 85.71% |
| 7 | 80.77% |
| Average | 78% |
AWS Official Practice Exam (AWS Skill Builder)
I also took the official AWS practice exam available in the paid Skill Builder platform. This exam is valuable because it reflects the actual exam style and difficulty.
It uses the same scoring scale from 100 to 1,000, unlike other practice exams that use percentages, so the metrics are not directly comparable.
My score:
| Exam | Score |
|---|---|
| Official Practice Exam | 893 |
At the beginning, practice exams were challenging and required significant effort. Over time, I became more familiar with the question patterns and answer structures.
It is essential to review every question after each practice exam, including both correct and incorrect answers. This helps identify weak areas and focus improvements.
I also recommend consulting AWS documentation and using LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini to clarify doubts, identify weak points, and track study progress.
Exam Day
When I took the exam, I found it difficult. By the end, I was not sure whether I had passed or not. Time management is critical, as you have only about 2 minutes per question.
A common pattern in the questions is having two clearly incorrect answers and two very similar ones. Often, both may be technically correct, but one is more aligned with the specific requirements of the question.
About 8 hours after finishing the exam, I received the approval email, and my final score was 846. This confirmed that my preparation was consistent and aligned with the exam level. Overall, I believe that intensive practice exams and detailed review of each question were the key factors in my success.