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 takeaways from the journey.
I have over five years of experience in DevOps, platform engineering, and related areas. Since most of that experience was focused on AWS, it was my natural starting point for the exam. In addition, having obtained the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification in 2023 gave me good familiarity with the evaluation process and the dynamics of the online exam.
The Exam
The AWS Solutions Architect - Associate is considerably more difficult than the Cloud Practitioner. All questions involve technical and architecture-specific details, requiring analysis of trade-offs and benefits aligned with the scenario described. The content is distributed across four domains:
- Design secure architectures
- Design resilient architectures
- Design high-performance architectures
- Design cost-optimized architectures
Understanding these domains is essential for a good result, as they define which AWS services you need to study in depth.
Preparation
The total preparation time was around 3 months. I started with Andre Iacono’s course, which was useful at first, especially for EC2 and S3, but the content was quite outdated on other topics.
I then moved on to Stephane Maarek’s course, which I strongly recommend. Beyond having a depth level well aligned with the exam, it is very comprehensive, covering a wide variety of services and explaining architecture layers in detail.
I also consider it important to revisit fundamental computing concepts such as network protocols, DNS resolution, auto scaling, elasticity, and cloud models like PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS, among others.
Practice Exams
Taking practice exams is the most important part of preparation. The exam consists of 65 questions, of which 50 are scored and 15 are unscored experimental questions from AWS.
The minimum passing score is 720 on a scale of 100 to 1,000, not a simple percentage of correct answers, as AWS uses scaled scoring. I used this as a benchmark, aiming to exceed 72% correct answers as a practical reference.
Stephane Maarek’s Practice Exams – the community generally considers these harder than the actual exam:
| Practice Exam | Score |
|---|---|
| 1 | 72% |
| 2 | 69% |
| 3 | 76% |
| 4 | 66% |
| 5 | 73% |
| 6 | 73% |
| Average | 71.5% |
Slightly below the ideal average, but I considered it consistent with the difficulty level.
Andre Iacono’s Practice Exams:
| Practice Exam | Score |
|---|---|
| 1 | 78% |
| 2 | 81% |
| Average | 79.5% |
I found the level a bit easier than the real exam.
Tutorials Dojo is the most highly rated platform for practice exams. I completed all 7 available exams:
| Practice 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 completed the official AWS practice exam, available on the Skill Builder platform in its paid version. It is particularly valuable because it is created by AWS itself, giving a solid sense of the style and actual difficulty level of the exam.
It is worth noting that this practice exam uses the same scoring scale as the real exam (100 to 1,000), unlike the previous ones which use a percentage of correct answers, so do not compare the metrics directly.
My score was:
| Practice Exam | Score |
|---|---|
| Official Practice Exam | 893 |
In the beginning, the practice exams were challenging and required a lot of effort. As I progressed, however, I became more comfortable with the structure of the questions and answer choices.
It is essential to review every question in each practice exam, both correct and incorrect answers. This helps identify weak areas and focus on improvement.
Consulting the official AWS documentation and using LLMs like Perplexity and Gemini were also great allies for clearing up doubts and tracking study progress.
Exam Day
When I took the exam, I found it difficult. By the end I had no idea whether I had passed or not. Time management needs to be precise, as there are only 2 minutes per question.
A common pattern in the questions is having two clearly wrong answers and two very similar ones. Both can often seem correct, but one fits the scenario and what is being asked more precisely.
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 well aligned with the exam’s level of difficulty. Overall, I consider intensive practice exam sessions and detailed review of every question to be the main factors behind passing.