AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 Exam Learning Path (Retired)

⚠️ EXAM RETIRED — SAA-C01 is No Longer Available

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 was retired in 2020. It was succeeded by SAA-C02 (also retired August 29, 2022), and then by the current SAA-C03 exam.

This content is maintained for historical reference only. You cannot register for or take the SAA-C01 exam.

Current Exam:

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Learning Path — The current version of this certification (active as of 2026)

What Changed (SAA-C01 → SAA-C03):

Greater focus on AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars
New services added: AWS Organizations, Control Tower, Lake Formation, EventBridge, Step Functions, EKS, Fargate, and more
Expanded security and governance coverage
More emphasis on hybrid cloud and migration strategies
Updated to reflect current AWS service landscape (2022+)

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 Exam Summary (Historical)

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 validated the ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies:

Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.

Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the life cycle of the project.

The SAA-C01 exam focused on building scalable, highly available, cost-effective, performant, resilient, and operationally effective architectures across the following topic areas:

Be sure to cover the following topics
- Networking
  - Be sure to create VPC from scratch. This is mandatory.
    - Create VPC and understand what’s a CIDR.
    - Create public and private subnets, configure proper routes, security groups, NACLs.
    - Create Bastion for communication with instances
    - Create NAT Gateway or Instances for instances in private subnets to interact with internet
    - Create two tier architecture with application in public and database in private subnets
    - Create three tier architecture with web servers in public, application and database servers in private.
    - Make sure to understand how the communication happens between Internet, Public subnets, Private subnets, NAT, Bastion etc.
  - Understand VPC endpoints and what services it can help interact
  - Understand difference between NAT Gateway and NAT Instance
  - Understand how NAT high availability can be achieved
  - Understand CloudFront as CDN and the static and dynamic caching it provides, what can be its origin (it can point to on-premises sources)
  - Understand Route 53 for routing, health checks and various routing policies it provides and their use cases mainly for high availability
  - Be sure to cover ELB in deep. AWS has introduced ALB and NLB and there are lot of questions on ALB
  - Understand ALB features with its ability for content based and URL based routing with support for dynamic port mapping with ECS
- Storage
  - Understand various storage options S3, EBS, Instance store, EFS, Glacier and what are the use cases and anti patterns for each
  - Understand various EBS volume types and their use cases in terms of IOPS and throughput. SSD for IOPS and HDD for throughput
  - Understand Burst performance and I/O credits to handle occasional peaks
  - Understand S3 features like different storage classes with lifecycle policies, static website hosting, versioning, Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download, CORS
  - Understand Glacier as an archival storage with various retrieval patterns
  - Understand Storage gateway and its different types
- Compute
  - Understand EC2 as a whole
  - Understand Auto Scaling and ELB, how they work together to provide High Available and Scalable solution
  - Understand EC2 various purchase types – Reserved, On-demand and Spot and their use cases
  - Understand Lambda and serverless architecture, its features and use cases
  - Understand ECS with its ability to deploy containers and micro services architecture
  - Know Elastic Beanstalk at a high level, what it provides and its ability to get an application running quickly
- Databases
  - Understand relational and NoSQL data storage options which include RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora and their use cases
  - Understand RDS features – Read Replicas for scalability, Multi-AZ for High Availability, Automated Backups, underlying volume types
  - Understand DynamoDB with its low latency performance, DAX
  - Understand DynamoDB provisioned throughput for Read/Writes
  - Know ElastiCache use cases, mainly for caching performance
- Analytics
  - Understand Redshift as a data warehousing tool
  - Know Kinesis for real time data capture and analytics
- Security
  - Understand IAM as a whole
  - Focus on IAM role and its use case especially with EC2 instance
  - Understand IAM identity providers and federation and use cases
  - Understand encryption services
    - KMS for key management and envelope encryption
    - Focus on S3 with SSE, SSE-C, SSE-KMS
  - Refer Disaster Recovery whitepaper for different recovery types with impact on RTO/RPO.
- Management Tools
  - Understand CloudWatch monitoring to provide operational transparency
  - Know which EC2 metrics it can track. Remember, it cannot track memory and disk space/swap utilization
  - Understand CloudWatch is extendable with custom metrics
  - Understand CloudTrail for Audit
- Integration Tools
  - Understand SQS as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
  - Understand SQS features like visibility, long poll vs short poll
  - Focus on SQS as a decoupling service
  - Understand SQS FIFO and the differences between standard and FIFO

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 Exam Resources (Archived)

Note: The resources below were relevant for the SAA-C01 exam (retired 2020). For current SAA-C03 study resources, visit the SAA-C03 Learning Path.

Online Courses (Historical)
- Stephane Maarek – Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate — Updated for SAA-C03
General Preparation Tips (Still Valid)
- Sign up with AWS for the Free Tier account which provides a lot of services to try for free
- Read the FAQs for important topics, as they cover key points and are good for quick review