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AWS Solutions Architect Associate Study Notes

Comprehensive study materials covering all SAA-C03 exam domains and objectives.

Design Resilient Architectures (26%)

Multi-AZ and Multi-Region Architectures

Availability Zones (AZs)

  • Isolated locations within AWS Regions
  • Connected with low-latency links
  • Design for single AZ failure tolerance
  • Use multiple AZs for high availability

Multi-Region Considerations

  • Disaster recovery and business continuity
  • Data sovereignty and compliance
  • Latency optimization for global users
  • Cross-region replication strategies

Scalable and Loosely Coupled Architectures

Auto Scaling

  • EC2 Auto Scaling Groups
  • Application Auto Scaling
  • Predictive scaling and scheduled scaling
  • Target tracking scaling policies

Loose Coupling Patterns

  • SQS for asynchronous messaging
  • SNS for pub/sub notifications
  • EventBridge for event-driven architectures
  • API Gateway for microservices

Fault-Tolerant Storage

Amazon S3

  • 11 9's (99.999999999%) durability
  • Cross-Region Replication (CRR)
  • Versioning and MFA Delete
  • S3 Transfer Acceleration

Amazon EBS

  • Automatic replication within AZ
  • Snapshot backup to S3
  • Cross-region snapshot copying
  • EBS Multi-Attach for shared storage
Quick Reference

Exam Format

  • 65 questions, 130 minutes
  • Multiple choice, multiple response
  • Passing score: 720/1000

Key AWS Services

  • Compute: EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS
  • Storage: S3, EBS, EFS, FSx
  • Database: RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
  • Networking: VPC, ELB, CloudFront, Route 53