AWS scores 50 of the 65 questions on SAA-C03 and weights them 30% security, 26% resilience, 24% performance and 20% cost, according to the SAA-C03 exam guide. Give your study hours in the same proportions. At about 10 hours a week, six weeks gives you 15 hours on security, 13 on resilience, 12 on performance, 10 on cost and a last week for timed practice.
Six weeks at 10 hours is a CramHQ planning assumption. The exam guide expects at least one year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS. If you have less, add weeks and keep the same split.
Exam format
The AWS certification page lists 65 questions in 130 minutes, which works out to two minutes a question. Fifteen of those questions are unscored items AWS is testing for future exams, and the exam guide says they are not identified. You cannot tell which ones they are, so give every question the same care.
Unanswered questions are scored as wrong, and there is no penalty for guessing. Answer all 65, even if the last few are guesses.
There are two question types. Multiple choice has one correct answer out of four options. Multiple response has two or more correct answers out of five or more options.
Results are a scaled score from 100 to 1,000, and 720 passes. AWS uses a compensatory model, so you only need to pass the exam as a whole, and a strong security result can make up for a weak cost result. Your score report may classify how you did in each section, but the guide itself says to "use caution when you interpret section-level feedback." Use it to choose where to start retesting after a fail.
The exam shows short names for well-known services, such as Amazon SNS for Amazon Simple Notification Service. The Help feature on every question lists the full names, per AWS's page on service mentions on the exam.
If English is not your first language and you take the exam in English, AWS's before testing policy offers a 30-minute extension called ESL +30. You request it once, before you register, and it applies to later bookings too. It raises your time to 160 minutes, close to two and a half minutes a question.
Domains and weights
Multiply the 50 scored questions by each weight and you get about 15, 13, 12 and 10 questions per domain. AWS publishes only the weights, so those counts are estimates.
| Domain | Weight | Scored questions, about | Tasks | Hours in this plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Design Secure Architectures | 30% | 15 | 3 | 15 |
| 2. Design Resilient Architectures | 26% | 13 | 2 | 13 |
| 3. Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% | 12 | 5 | 12 |
| 4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% | 10 | 4 | 10 |
Domains 3 and 4 cover mostly the same services from two angles. Domain 3 asks for high-performing storage, compute, databases, networks and data ingestion. Domain 4 asks for cost-optimized storage, compute, databases and networks. Study them together, one service area at a time. You learn the fast option and the cheap option for databases in the same sitting, and you see where speed and cost trade off.
Six-week plan
Each week is about 10 hours, and the task numbers are AWS's own, from the exam guide.
| Week | What to study | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AWS's free Official Practice Question Set as a first look, then Task 1.1, secure access (IAM users, groups, roles, federation, multiple accounts) | 10 |
| 2 | Tasks 1.2 and 1.3, secure workloads and data security controls (5 hours), then Task 2.1, scalable and loosely coupled designs (5 hours) | 10 |
| 3 | Task 2.2, high availability and disaster recovery (8 hours), then start storage with Tasks 3.1 and 4.1 (2 hours) | 10 |
| 4 | Finish storage, then compute (Tasks 3.2 and 4.2) and databases (Tasks 3.3 and 4.3) | 10 |
| 5 | Networks (Tasks 3.4 and 4.4) and data ingestion (Task 3.5) | 10 |
| 6 | One timed attempt at the Official Practice Exam, then retest the tasks behind your wrong answers | 10 |
If your week 1 results or your background make one domain easy for you, move some of its hours to the heavier domain you find hardest. A gap in a 30% domain costs more scored questions than the same gap in a 20% domain.
Domain checks
Most of the skills in the exam guide's task statements start with Determining, Selecting or Designing. For every task, practice choosing between the services it lists, using short scenarios. AWS's documentation gives clear cases for at least one task in each domain, and every other task needs the same kind of practice.
Security
Domain 1 has three tasks. Task 1.1 covers who can reach what, with IAM, IAM Identity Center, role switching, cross-account access, AWS Control Tower and service control policies. Task 1.2 covers securing workloads and applications, with network controls such as security groups, network ACLs and NAT gateways, and services such as AWS WAF, AWS Shield, Amazon Cognito and Secrets Manager. Task 1.3 covers data, including encryption with AWS KMS, TLS certificates from ACM, key policies and backups.
A good check for Task 1.2 is return traffic. When a security group allows inbound traffic to an instance, the reply goes back out even if the group has no outbound rule for it. A network ACL works differently, and the reply needs its own outbound rule. The difference is that security groups are stateful and network ACLs are stateless, as the Amazon VPC guide explains.
Resilience
Domain 2 splits into loose coupling (queues, events, containers, serverless, read replicas) and staying up through failure (Availability Zones, Regions, Route 53, failover and disaster recovery).
Task 2.2 asks you to select a disaster recovery strategy that meets business requirements, such as a recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). AWS's disaster recovery whitepaper groups the options into four approaches, from the low cost of backup and restore, through pilot light and warm standby, to multi-site active/active. It calls multi-site active/active the most complex and costly, and says it can bring recovery time close to zero for most disasters. Pilot light keeps data replicated with application servers switched off. Warm standby keeps a scaled-down but fully working copy running, which shortens recovery. AWS itself notes that the difference between the two can be difficult to understand, so practice choosing between them from a scenario's RTO.
Performance and cost
These checks run across weeks 3 to 5, because the two domains share service areas.
For compute, Task 3.2 names choosing "the amount of Lambda memory" as a skill. Lambda allocates CPU in proportion to the memory you configure. A function slowed by CPU-heavy work can run faster with more memory, even when it is not using the memory it has. Watch for that case in compute scenarios.
For networks, Task 4.4 names the choice between one shared NAT gateway and one in each Availability Zone. AWS charges for each hour a NAT gateway is available and for each gigabyte it processes, so one gateway has the lower hourly cost. The NAT gateway guide adds that if a shared gateway's Availability Zone goes down, resources in the other zones lose internet access, and recommends a gateway in each zone for resiliency. The pricing page also suggests a gateway per zone when a lot of traffic crosses zones. In a scenario, look for the requirement that settles it, whether that is staying online when a zone fails, heavy cross-zone traffic, or the lowest cost.
Data ingestion, Task 3.5, has no cost task to pair with. It gets its own time in week 5, covering streaming with Amazon Kinesis, transformation with AWS Glue, transfer with AWS DataSync and Storage Gateway, and queries with Amazon Athena.
Official practice questions
AWS's SAA-C03 exam prep page on Skill Builder lists two official practice products.
The Official Practice Question Set is free once you sign in. It has 20 questions and a 40-minute duration, and AWS describes its purpose as getting familiar with the structure, format and style of the questions. Twenty questions across four domains is about five per domain. That is enough to learn the style in week 1 and too few to rank your domains.
The Official Practice Exam has 65 questions in 130 minutes, with the same scaled scoring and pass or fail result as the real exam. It needs a paid Skill Builder subscription.
AWS says you can take each one multiple times, and each time "will include the same questions in a different order." So your first attempt at each is the only one that measures what you know without having seen the questions. A higher score the second time can come from remembering the questions. Take the Official Practice Exam once in week 6, under exam timing, and spend the rest of that week on the tasks behind the questions you got wrong.
Booking and retakes
The exam costs USD 150, and you can take it at a Pearson VUE test center or online with a proctor, per the certification page.
The before testing policy lets you reschedule up to 24 hours before your appointment, and each appointment can be rescheduled twice. Inside those 24 hours you cannot cancel or reschedule, except with documentation for illness or an emergency. With two reschedules available, you can book a date at the end of week 6 when you start week 1 and still move it later.
720 is the pass mark itself, so a first practice exam score right at it leaves you no room for an off day. As a CramHQ rule of thumb, keep your date if that first attempt scores 780 or more and you can make the service choices for every task. Between 720 and 780, keep it only if your wrong answers sit in one or two tasks you can fix that week. Otherwise reschedule while you are still more than 24 hours out, and give another week to the weakest of your heavier domains.
If you fail, the after testing policy says you wait 14 calendar days before you can retake, and you pay the full fee each time, with no limit on attempts. Results reach your AWS Certification Account within five business days.
Your first week
If you want a baseline before you decide whether to move hours between domains, CramHQ's free SAA-C03 assessment takes about 15 minutes, needs no credit card, and shows which areas are weakest when you finish. The Pass Plan costs USD 34.99 once for 12 months of access and orders repair tasks by how many exam points each gap costs. It also includes 5 practice tests and a 65-question timed simulation, which you can use for timed practice in week 6.
This week, take the Official Practice Question Set once, read the four domain pages of the exam guide, and spend the rest of your hours on Task 1.1.