AWS Solutions Architect Professional study guide
AWS Solutions Architect Professional · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional is the advanced tier of the AWS Solutions Architect certification path. AWS introduced it in May 2014 as the program's first Professional-level exam, positioning it above the Associate-level exam: it validates advanced technical skills and experience and concentrates on the design and development of distributed systems. The AWS Solutions Architect Professional study guide has 5 sections and about 1,843 words.
01Designing for Dynamic Scaling, High Availability, Fault Tolerance, and Reliability
HA within a Region usually means eliminating single points of failure across Availability Zones (Multi-AZ). Fault tolerance or Region-loss survival pushes you to multi-Region, which forces an explicit RTO/RPO decision and therefore a DR pattern: backup and restore (hours), pilot light, warm standby, or active-active (near zero).
361 words, about 2 min02Selecting the Right AWS Service for the Stated Requirements
Questions in this domain are written so that one constraint word eliminates most answers: duration, payload size, ordering, latency, protocol, operating system, or concurrency. Compute: Lambda for event-driven code under 15 minutes; Fargate or ECS/EKS when you need containers or per-request isolation without host management; EC2 when you need the OS, specialized hardware, or licensed software; Batch for queued batch jobs; App Runner for simple HTTP containers.
379 words, about 2 min03Migrating Complex, Multi-Tier Applications to AWS
Retire, retain, rehost, relocate, replatform, repurchase, refactor. Almost every prompt resolves to one of these, and the decision is driven by timeline, appetite for code change, and licensing.
380 words, about 2 min04Designing Enterprise-Wide Scalable Operations
Enterprises scale by splitting accounts along boundaries: security, log archive, shared services, network, and per-workload or per-environment accounts. AWS Organizations provides consolidated billing and policy inheritance; organizational units group accounts; service control policies cap the maximum permissions available in member accounts.
344 words, about 2 min05Implementing Cost Control Strategies
Eliminate waste, then rightsize, then commit, then re-architect. Waste: idle load balancers, unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, non-production resources running nights and weekends, forgotten Elastic IPs.
379 words, about 2 min