My Journal for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03

---

Resources / Materials to be used:

Video Resources:

Udemy:

Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 by Stephane Maarek - length 27 Hours

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Training SAA-C03 by Neal Davis - length 24 Hours

A Cloud Guru:

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) by ACloudGuru - length 44 Hour

Table of Contents

---

1. Introduction

Introduction

---

Exam Content Breakdown:

Domain	% of Exam
Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures	30%
Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures	26%
Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures	24%
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures	20%

Domain Scopes:

---

Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures

1.1 Design secure access to AWS resources.

Task Statement 1: Design secure access to AWS resources.

• Knowledge of:

  • Access controls and management across multiple accounts
  • AWS federated access and identity services (for example, AWS Identity and Access
  • Management [IAM], AWS Single Sign-On [AWS SSO])
  • AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
  • AWS security best practices (for example, the principle of least privilege)
  • The AWS shared responsibility model

• Skills in:

  • Applying AWS security best practices to IAM users and root users (for example, multi-factor authentication [MFA])
  • Designing a flexible authorization model that includes IAM users, groups, roles, and policies
  • Designing a role-based access control strategy (for example, AWS Security Token Service [AWS STS], role switching, cross-account access)
  • Designing a security strategy for multiple AWS accounts (for example, AWS Control Tower, service control policies [SCPs])
  • Determining the appropriate use of resource policies for AWS services
  • Determining when to federate a directory service with IAM roles

1.2 Design secure workloads and applications

Task Statement 2: Design secure workloads and applications.

• Knowledge of:

  • Application configuration and credentials security
  • AWS service endpoints
  • Control ports, protocols, and network traffic on AWS
  • Secure application access
  • Security services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Cognito, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Macie)
  • Threat vectors external to AWS (for example, DDoS, SQL injection)

• Skills in:

  • Designing VPC architectures with security components (for example, security groups, route tables, network ACLs, NAT gateways)
  • Determining network segmentation strategies (for example, using public subnets and private subnets)
  • Integrating AWS services to secure applications (for example, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS SSO, AWS Secrets Manager)
  • Securing external network connections to and from the AWS Cloud (for example, VPN, AWS Direct Connect)

1.3 Determine appropriate data security controls

Task Statement 3: Determine appropriate data security controls.

• Knowledge of:
  • Data access and governance
  • Data recovery
  • Data retention and classification
  • Encryption and appropriate key management
• Skills in:
  • Aligning AWS technologies to meet compliance requirements
  • Encrypting data at rest (for example, AWS Key Management Service [AWS KMS])
  • Encrypting data in transit (for example, AWS Certificate Manager [ACM] using TLS)
  • Implementing access policies for encryption keys
  • Implementing data backups and replications
  • Implementing policies for data access, lifecycle, and protection
  • Rotating encryption keys and renewing certificates

---

Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures

2.1 Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures.

Task Statement 1: Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures.

• Knowledge of:

  • API creation and management (for example, Amazon API Gateway, REST API)
  • AWS managed services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Transfer Family, Amazon Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS], Secrets Manager)
  • Caching strategies
  • Design principles for microservices (for example, stateless workloads compared with stateful workloads)
  • Event-driven architectures
  • Horizontal scaling and vertical scaling
  • How to appropriately use edge accelerators (for example, content delivery network [CDN])
  • How to migrate applications into containers
  • Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
  • Multi-tier architectures
  • Queuing and messaging concepts (for example, publish/subscribe)
  • Serverless technologies and patterns (for example, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda)
  • Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)
  • The orchestration of containers (for example, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS], Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS])
  • When to use read replicas
  • Workflow orchestration (for example, AWS Step Functions)

• Skills in:

  • Designing event-driven, microservice, and/or multi-tier architectures based on requirements
  • Determining scaling strategies for components used in an architecture design
  • Determining the AWS services required to achieve loose coupling based on requirements
  • Determining when to use containers
  • Determining when to use serverless technologies and patterns
  • Recommending appropriate compute, storage, networking, and database technologies based on requirements
  • Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads

2.2 Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures.

Task Statement 2: Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures.

• Knowledge of:
  • AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions, Amazon Route 53)
  • AWS managed services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Comprehend,Amazon Polly)
  • Basic networking concepts (for example, route tables)
  • Disaster recovery (DR) strategies (for example, backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active failover, recovery point objective [RPO], recovery time objective [RTO])
  • Distributed design patterns
  • Failover strategies
  • Immutable infrastructure
  • Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
  • Proxy concepts (for example, Amazon RDS Proxy)
  • Service quotas and throttling (for example, how to configure the service quotas for a workload in a standby environment)
  • Storage options and characteristics (for example, durability, replication)
  • Workload visibility (for example, AWS X-Ray)
• Skills in:
  • Determining automation strategies to ensure infrastructure integrity
  • Determining the AWS services required to provide a highly available and/or fault-tolerant architecture across AWS Regions or Availability Zones
  • Identifying metrics based on business requirements to deliver a highly available solution
  • Implementing designs to mitigate single points of failure
  • Implementing strategies to ensure the durability and availability of data (for example, backups)
  • Selecting an appropriate DR strategy to meet business requirements
  • Using AWS services that improve the reliability of legacy applications and applications not built for the cloud (for example, when application changes are not possible)
  • Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads

---

Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures

3.1 Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions

Task Statement 1: Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions.

• Knowledge of:
  • Hybrid storage solutions to meet business requirements
  • Storage services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic File System [Amazon EFS], Amazon Elastic Block Store [Amazon EBS])
  • Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)
• Skills in:
  • Determining storage services and configurations that meet performance demands
  • Determining storage services that can scale to accommodate future needs

3.2 Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions.

Task Statement 2: Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions.

• Knowledge of:
  • AWS compute services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, Fargate)
  • Distributed computing concepts supported by AWS global infrastructure and edge services
  • Queuing and messaging concepts (for example, publish/subscribe)
  • Scalability capabilities with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Auto Scaling)
  • Serverless technologies and patterns (for example, Lambda, Fargate)
  • The orchestration of containers (for example, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS)
• Skills in:
  • Decoupling workloads so that components can scale independently
  • Identifying metrics and conditions to perform scaling actions
  • Selecting the appropriate compute options and features (for example, EC2 instance types) to meet business requirements
  • Selecting the appropriate resource type and size (for example, the amount of Lambda memory) to meet business requirements

3.3 Determine high-performing database solutions.

Task Statement 3: Determine high-performing database solutions.

• Knowledge of:

  • AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
  • Caching strategies and services (for example, Amazon ElastiCache)
  • Data access patterns (for example, read-intensive compared with write-intensive)
  • Database capacity planning (for example, capacity units, instance types, Provisioned IOPS)
  • Database connections and proxies
  • Database engines with appropriate use cases (for example, heterogeneous migrations, homogeneous migrations)
    • Database replication (for example, read replicas)
    • Database types and services (for example, serverless, relational compared with non-relational, in-memory)

• Skills in:

  • Configuring read replicas to meet business requirements
  • Designing database architectures
  • Determining an appropriate database engine (for example, MySQL compared with PostgreSQL)
  • Determining an appropriate database type (for example, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB)
  • Integrating caching to meet business requirements

3.4 Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures.

Task Statement 4: Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures.

• Knowledge of:
  • Edge networking services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator)
  • How to design network architecture (for example, subnet tiers, routing, IP addressing)
  • Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
  • Network connection options (for example, AWS VPN, Direct Connect, AWS PrivateLink)
• Skills in:
  • Creating a network topology for various architectures (for example, global, hybrid, multi-tier)
  • Determining network configurations that can scale to accommodate future needs
  • Determining the appropriate placement of resources to meet business requirements
  • Selecting the appropriate load balancing strategy

3.5 Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.

Task Statement 5: Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.

• Knowledge of:
  • Data analytics and visualization services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Athena, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon QuickSight)
  • Data ingestion patterns (for example, frequency)
  • Data transfer services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway)
  • Data transformation services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Glue)
  • Secure access to ingestion access points
  • Sizes and speeds needed to meet business requirements
  • Streaming data services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Kinesis)
• Skills in:
  • Building and securing data lakes
  • Designing data streaming architectures
  • Designing data transfer solutions
  • Implementing visualization strategies
  • Selecting appropriate compute options for data processing (for example, Amazon EMR)
  • Selecting appropriate configurations for ingestion
  • Transforming data between formats (for example, .csv to .parquet)

---

Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

4.1 Design cost-optimized storage solutions.

• Task Statement 1: Design cost-optimized storage solutions.
  • Knowledge of:
    • Access options (for example, an S3 bucket with Requester Pays object storage)
    • AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
    • AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
    • AWS storage services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon FSx, Amazon EFS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS)
    • Backup strategies
    • Block storage options (for example, hard disk drive [HDD] volume types, solid state drive [SSD] volume types)
    • Data lifecycles
    • Hybrid storage options (for example, DataSync, Transfer Family, Storage Gateway)
    • Storage access patterns
    • Storage tiering (for example, cold tiering for object storage)
    • Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)
• Skills in:
  • Designing appropriate storage strategies (for example, batch uploads to Amazon S3 compared with individual uploads)
  • Determining the correct storage size for a workload
  • Determining the lowest cost method of transferring data for a workload to AWS storage
  • Determining when storage auto scaling is required
  • Managing S3 object lifecycles
  • Selecting the appropriate backup and/or archival solution
  • Selecting the appropriate service for data migration to storage services
  • Selecting the appropriate storage tier
  • Selecting the correct data lifecycle for storage
  • Selecting the most cost-effective storage service for a workload

4.2 Design cost-optimized compute solutions.

Task Statement 2: Design cost-optimized compute solutions.

• Knowledge of:
  • AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
  • AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
  • AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
  • AWS purchasing options (for example, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans)
  • Distributed compute strategies (for example, edge processing)
  • Hybrid compute options (for example, AWS Outposts, AWS Snowball Edge)
  • Instance types, families, and sizes (for example, memory optimized, compute optimized, virtualization)
  • Optimization of compute utilization (for example, containers, serverless computing, microservices)
  • Scaling strategies (for example, auto scaling, hibernation)
• Skills in:
  • Determining an appropriate load balancing strategy (for example, Application Load Balancer [Layer 7] compared with Network Load Balancer [Layer 4] compared with Gateway Load Balancer)
  • Determining appropriate scaling methods and strategies for elastic workloads (for example, horizontal compared with vertical, EC2 hibernation)
  • Determining cost-effective AWS compute services with appropriate use cases (for example, Lambda, Amazon EC2, Fargate)
  • Determining the required availability for different classes of workloads (for example, production workloads, non-production workloads)
  • Selecting the appropriate instance family for a workload
  • Selecting the appropriate instance size for a workload

4.3 Design cost-optimized database solutions.

Task Statement 3: Design cost-optimized database solutions.

• Knowledge of:
  • AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
  • AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
  • Caching strategies
  • Data retention policies
  • Database capacity planning (for example, capacity units)
  • Database connections and proxies
  • Database engines with appropriate use cases (for example, heterogeneous migrations, homogeneous migrations)
  • Database replication (for example, read replicas)
  • Database types and services (for example, relational compared with non-relational, Aurora, DynamoDB)
• Skills in:
  • Designing appropriate backup and retention policies (for example, snapshot frequency)
  • Determining an appropriate database engine (for example, MySQL compared with PostgreSQL)
  • Determining cost-effective AWS database services with appropriate use cases (for example, DynamoDB compared with Amazon RDS, serverless)
  • Determining cost-effective AWS database types (for example, time series format, columnar format)
  • Migrating database schemas and data to different locations and/or different database engines

4.4 Design cost-optimized network architectures.

Task Statement 4: Design cost-optimized network architectures.

• Knowledge of:
  • AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
  • AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
  • Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
  • NAT gateways (for example, NAT instance costs compared with NAT gateway costs)
  • Network connectivity (for example, private lines, dedicated lines, VPNs)
  • Network routing, topology, and peering (for example, AWS Transit Gateway, VPC peering)
  • Network services with appropriate use cases (for example, DNS)
• Skills in:
  • Configuring appropriate NAT gateway types for a network (for example, a single shared NAT gateway compared with NAT gateways for each Availability Zone)
  • Configuring appropriate network connections (for example, Direct Connect compared with VPN compared with internet)
  • Configuring appropriate network routes to minimize network transfer costs (for example, Region to Region, Availability Zone to Availability Zone, private to public, Global Accelerator,VPC endpoints)
  • Determining strategic needs for content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge caching
  • Reviewing existing workloads for network optimizations
  • Selecting an appropriate throttling strategy
  • Selecting the appropriate bandwidth allocation for a network device (for example, a singleVPC compared with multiple VPNs, Direct Connect speed)

---

Which key tools, technologies, and concepts might be covered on the exam?

• Compute
• Cost management
• Database
• Disaster recovery
• High performance
• Management and governance
• Microservices and component decoupling
• Migration and data transfer
• Networking, connectivity, and content delivery
• Resiliency
• Security
• Serverless and event-driven design principles
• Storage

AWS services and features

• Analytics:

  • Amazon Athena
  • AWS Data Exchange
  • AWS Data Pipeline
  • Amazon EMR
  • AWS Glue
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • AWS Lake Formation
  • Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon Elasticsearch Service)
  • Amazon QuickSight
  • Amazon Redshift

• Application Integration:

  • Amazon AppFlow
  • AWS AppSync
  • Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events)
  • Amazon MQ
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
  • AWS Step Functions

• AWS Cost Management:

  • AWS Budgets
  • AWS Cost and Usage Report
  • AWS Cost Explorer
  • Savings Plans

• Compute:

  • AWS Batch
  • Amazon EC2
  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  • AWS Outposts
  • AWS Serverless Application Repository
  • VMware Cloud on AWS
  • AWS Wavelength

• Containers:

  • Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
  • Amazon ECS Anywhere
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
  • Amazon EKS Anywhere
  • Amazon EKS Distro

• Database:

  • Amazon Aurora
  • Amazon Aurora Serverless
  • Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • Amazon ElastiCache
  • Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
  • Amazon Neptune
  • Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB)
  • Amazon RDS
  • Amazon Redshift
  • Amazon Timestream

• Developer Tools:

  • AWS X-Ray

• Front-End Web and Mobile:

  • AWS Amplify
  • Amazon API Gateway
  • AWS Device Farm
  • Amazon Pinpoint

• Machine Learning:

  • Amazon Comprehend
  • Amazon Forecast
  • Amazon Fraud Detector
  • Amazon Kendra
  • Amazon Lex
  • Amazon Polly
  • Amazon Rekognition
  • Amazon SageMaker
  • Amazon Textract
  • Amazon Transcribe
  • Amazon Translate

• Management and Governance:

  • AWS Auto Scaling
  • AWS CloudFormation
  • AWS CloudTrail
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)
  • AWS Compute Optimizer
  • AWS Config
  • AWS Control Tower
  • AWS License Manager
  • Amazon Managed Grafana
  • Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
  • AWS Management Console
  • AWS Organizations
  • AWS Personal Health Dashboard
  • AWS Proton
  • AWS Service Catalog
  • AWS Systems Manager
  • AWS Trusted Advisor
  • AWS Well-Architected Tool

• Media Services:

  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder
  • Amazon Kinesis Video Streams -Migration and Transfer:
  • AWS Application Discovery Service
  • AWS Application Migration Service (CloudEndure Migration)
  • AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
  • AWS DataSync
  • AWS Migration Hub
  • AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS)
  • AWS Snow Family
  • AWS Transfer Family

• Networking and Content Delivery:

  • Amazon CloudFront
  • AWS Direct Connect
  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
  • AWS Global Accelerator
  • AWS PrivateLink
  • Amazon Route 53
  • AWS Transit Gateway
  • Amazon VPC
  • AWS VPN

• Security, Identity, and Compliance:

  • AWS Artifact
  • AWS Audit Manager
  • AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
  • AWS CloudHSM
  • Amazon Cognito
  • Amazon Detective
  • AWS Directory Service
  • AWS Firewall Manager
  • Amazon GuardDuty
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Amazon Inspector
  • AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
  • Amazon Macie
  • AWS Network Firewall
  • AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)
  • AWS Secrets Manager
  • AWS Security Hub
  • AWS Shield
  • AWS Single Sign-On
  • AWS WAF

• Serverless:

  • AWS AppSync
  • AWS Fargate
  • AWS Lambda

• Storage:

  • AWS Backup
  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
  • Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
  • Amazon FSx (for all types)
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon S3 Glacier
  • AWS Storage Gateway

---

Recommended Reading AWS Documentation:

1. AWS WellArchitected Framework

   Six Pillars

   • Operational Excellence Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework
   • Security Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework
   • Reliability Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework
   • Performance Efficiency Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework
   • Cost Optimization Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework
   • Sustainability Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework

2. AWS Technology FAQ's

   AMAZON FAQS

   • Amazon EC2
   • Amazon Auto Scaling
   • Amazon VPC
   • Amazon S3
   • Amazon Elastic Block Store
   • Amazon Elastic File System
   • Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
   • Amazon Route 53
   • Amazon Storage Gateway
   • Amazon Organizations
   • Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM)
   • Amazon Relational Database Service(RDS)
   • Amazon CloudFront
   • Amazon SQS
   • Amazon SNS