Design Secure Architectures
30%IAM, network security, data protection, encryption, access boundaries, and secure workload design.
CertVectorAWS Solutions Architect Associate study guide
A six-week SAA-C03 plan built around architecture tradeoffs.
SAA-C03 is less about naming services and more about choosing the right architecture under constraints. Use this plan with drills that force secure, resilient, performant, and cost-aware decisions.
SAA-C03 domain weights
Design Resilient Architectures
26%Multi-AZ design, decoupling, disaster recovery, scalable storage, fault tolerance, and recovery objectives.
Design High-Performing Architectures
24%Compute, storage, database, networking, caching, content delivery, and performance-oriented service selection.
Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
20%Right-sizing, managed services, purchasing models, storage classes, lifecycle policies, and cost-aware architecture choices.
Weekly progression
Keep every week anchored in architecture decisions, not only documentation reading.
Week 1
Secure access and identity
Review IAM roles, policies, permission boundaries, identity federation, private access patterns, encryption choices, and least privilege.
Week 2
Network and data protection
Practice VPC design, public/private subnets, security groups, NACLs, KMS, Secrets Manager, S3 controls, and secure service access.
Week 3
Resilience and recovery
Study multi-AZ design, load balancing, Auto Scaling, decoupling with queues, backups, snapshots, RTO/RPO, and disaster recovery patterns.
Week 4
Performance-oriented service selection
Compare compute, storage, database, caching, CDN, and networking choices by latency, throughput, scale, and workload shape.
Week 5
Cost optimization
Practice right-sizing, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, S3 lifecycle policies, data transfer considerations, managed services, and cost visibility.
Week 6
Architecture simulations
Run timed mixed sets, review missed architecture tradeoffs, and retest weak domains until you can explain why a design is secure, resilient, performant, and cost-aware.
Use the plan inside the product
Start with mixed SAA-C03 drills, then filter by security, resilience, performance, or cost when the missed-review queue shows a design-pattern gap.