AWS Solutions Architect study guide
AWS Solutions Architect · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is a foundational-to-intermediate AWS certification aimed at people who design systems on the AWS Cloud. It suits cloud engineers, developers and system administrators stepping into architecture work, as well as technical consultants and pre-sales staff who need to translate requirements into working designs. The exam is organised around four equally weighted design domains: secure architectures, resilient architectures, high-performing architectures, and cost-optimized architectures. Questions are presented in multiple-choice and multiple-response formats, and each scenario asks you to pick the design that best satisfies a stated set of requirements, often with an explicit constraint such as budget, latency, or compliance. The AWS Solutions Architect study guide has 4 sections and about 1,364 words.
01Design Secure Architectures
Security questions on this exam are usually about who can do what, from where, and with what encryption . Know the IAM evaluation chain: an explicit deny always wins, then an explicit allow, otherwise the request is implicitly denied.
366 words, about 2 min02Design Resilient Architectures
Resilience questions are framed by RPO (data loss tolerated) and RTO (downtime tolerated) . Read those numbers first; they eliminate most options.
327 words, about 2 min03Design High-Performing Architectures
Performance questions reward picking the right tool for the bottleneck and knowing the scaling lever each service offers. Compute: match instance families to workload (compute, memory, storage, accelerated), consider Graviton for price-performance, and use placement groups - cluster for low-latency HPC (single AZ), spread for small numbers of critical instances, partition for distributed systems like HDFS and Kafka.
318 words, about 2 min04Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Cost questions test whether you can identify the shape of the workload and the hidden line items . Purchasing: On-Demand for spiky or short-lived work, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for steady-state baselines (Compute Savings Plans are the most flexible across families and regions), Spot for fault-tolerant batch and stateless workers with checkpointing.
353 words, about 2 min