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Free AWS Solutions Architect Associate Practice Questions

20 exam-style AWS Solutions Architect Associate questions with an explanation after every answer. No timer, no signup — about 15 minutes.

About the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam

The AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) is a Associate-level certification. It covers secure architectures, resilient architectures, high-performing architectures, and cost-optimized architectures. The exam has 65 questions and runs 130 minutes. You need a scaled score of 720 out of 1000 to pass.

The 20 practice questions on this page are written by an ex-Amazon engineer with 6 years at AWS and balanced across the exam domains using the official exam guide weighting. They use the same scenario-based style as the real SAA-C03 exam.

Sample AWS Solutions Architect Associate questions

Three examples from the 20-question quiz. Answers stay hidden until you reveal them.

Sample Question 1Design Secure Architectures

A company has an on-premises data center connected to AWS through a single AWS Direct Connect connection. The company requires encrypted connectivity between on-premises and their VPC. The current Direct Connect connection provides 1 Gbps of bandwidth, and the company cannot tolerate any single point of failure. A solutions architect needs to design a solution that provides both encryption and high availability. Which approach should the solutions architect take?

ACreate a VPN connection over the existing Direct Connect using a Direct Connect public virtual interface, and add a second Direct Connect connection at a different Direct Connect location for redundancy
BCreate an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection as a backup to the Direct Connect, and enable MACsec encryption on the Direct Connect connection
CSet up a second Direct Connect connection at a different location with MACsec encryption on both connections, and configure them in a Link Aggregation Group (LAG)
DCreate a transit VIF on the Direct Connect connection and establish a Site-to-Site VPN over the Direct Connect using AWS Transit Gateway. Add a second Direct Connect connection at a different location for redundancy
Show answer
Answer: D — Create a transit VIF on the Direct Connect connection and establish a Site-to-Site VPN over the Direct Connect using AWS Transit Gateway. Add a second Direct Connect connection at a different location for redundancy

A Site-to-Site VPN over Direct Connect (through a transit VIF and Transit Gateway) provides IPsec encryption for all traffic traversing the Direct Connect connection. Adding a second Direct Connect connection at a different location eliminates the single point of failure. This provides both encryption and high availability. Transit Gateway supports both VPN and Direct Connect attachments.

Sample Question 2Design Resilient Architectures

A company is migrating a monolithic application to a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate. The application consists of 8 microservices that need to communicate with each other. Some services handle bursty traffic patterns with requests varying from 100 to 10,000 per second. The team wants service-to-service communication that can handle service discovery as containers scale up and down, without managing load balancers for each internal service. Which approach should the solutions architect recommend?

ADeploy each microservice as an ECS service with an internal Application Load Balancer for each service and register services in Route 53 private hosted zones
BUse AWS App Mesh with Envoy sidecar proxies for service mesh communication and Amazon ECS Service Connect for service discovery
CUse Amazon ECS Service Connect, which provides built-in service discovery and load balancing through managed proxy containers without requiring separate load balancers
DConfigure each ECS service to use a Network Load Balancer with target group auto-scaling and register targets using AWS Cloud Map
Show answer
Answer: C — Use Amazon ECS Service Connect, which provides built-in service discovery and load balancing through managed proxy containers without requiring separate load balancers

ECS Service Connect provides built-in service discovery and client-side load balancing through managed proxy containers. It automatically handles service registration and deregistration as containers scale, supports traffic management, and does not require separate load balancers for each service. This is the simplest approach for service-to-service communication within ECS.

Sample Question 3Design High-Performing Architectures

A financial services company runs Monte Carlo simulations on a cluster of 200 EC2 instances. The simulations require a shared file system with sub-millisecond latency that can deliver over 100 GB/s aggregate throughput. The simulation data (20 TB) is loaded from S3 at the start of each run, processed for 4-6 hours, and results are written back to S3. The file system is not needed between simulation runs. Which shared storage solution is the MOST cost-effective for this workload?

AAmazon EFS with Provisioned Throughput mode configured for 100 GB/s and Max I/O performance mode
BAmazon FSx for Lustre with a Scratch file system type linked to the S3 bucket, using the SCRATCH_2 deployment type
CAmazon FSx for Lustre with a Persistent file system type and SSD storage linked to the S3 bucket
DAmazon FSx for Windows File Server with Multi-AZ deployment and SSD storage
Show answer
Answer: B — Amazon FSx for Lustre with a Scratch file system type linked to the S3 bucket, using the SCRATCH_2 deployment type

FSx for Lustre Scratch file systems are designed for temporary, high-performance workloads. SCRATCH_2 provides 200 MB/s per TiB of throughput (20 TB = 4 GB/s baseline, but with larger capacity or compression, higher throughput is achievable). Scratch file systems cost less than persistent because they do not replicate data. The native S3 integration allows lazy loading data from S3 and writing results back. Since the file system is not needed between runs, scratch is the most cost-effective because you only pay while it exists.

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Frequently asked questions about the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam

How many questions are on the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam?+

The SAA-C03 exam has 65 questions (a mix of multiple choice and multiple response) to be completed in 130 minutes. You need a scaled score of 720 out of 1000 to pass.

Is the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam hard?+

It is one of the more challenging associate-level certs. It requires broad knowledge of AWS services — S3, EC2, VPC, RDS, CloudFront, IAM, Lambda, and more — and the ability to choose the right architecture for complex scenarios. Most people study 4–8 weeks.

What topics are on the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam?+

The four domains are: Design Secure Architectures (30%), Design Resilient Architectures (26%), Design High-Performing Architectures (24%), and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%).

Is AWS SAA worth it?+

Yes — it is the most recognized cloud certification for getting cloud engineering and solutions architect roles. It passes most ATS resume filters and signals a solid AWS skill set. Particularly valuable for career changers and anyone targeting cloud engineering jobs.

What is the best study resource for AWS SAA?+

Tutorials Dojo practice exams are essential. For video content, Adrian Cantrill's course is the most thorough. Andrew Brown's freeCodeCamp course is free and covers the essentials. Pair with hands-on practice in the AWS free tier.

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