The SAA-C03 syllabus (AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate) is organized into four domains: Design Secure Architectures, Design Resilient Architectures, Design High-Performing Architectures, and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures. AWS publishes an exact weight for each domain and a set of task-statement objectives under it, listed in full below with what each one covers in practice.
AWS structures the SAA-C03 exam guide around four domains, each carrying a published weight that tells you roughly how many questions come from that area. Below is every domain with its official weight and the objective statements AWS lists under it.
SAA-C03 syllabus: domain weights
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| Design Secure Architectures | 30% |
| Design Resilient Architectures | 26% |
| Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% |
| Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% |
The heaviest single domain in the SAA-C03 exam objectives is Design Secure Architectures, so scenario questions about identity, access boundaries, and data protection show up often. The two performance-and-resilience domains combined outweigh security, so do not skip them while you focus on security controls.
Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures
- Design secure access to AWS resources
- Design secure workloads and applications
- Determine appropriate data security controls
In practice this domain covers how you scope IAM policies and roles, how you separate workloads with security groups, NACLs, and organizational boundaries, and how you choose encryption and key-management options for data at rest and in transit. Expect scenarios that ask you to pick the least-privilege or most isolated design among several that all technically work.
Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures
- Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures
- Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures
Questions here test whether you can decouple components with queues, event buses, or load balancers so a failure in one part does not cascade, and whether you can choose the right combination of Multi-AZ, Auto Scaling, and multi-Region patterns for a stated recovery target. Read the failure scenario carefully: the correct answer usually matches the exact availability or recovery requirement stated, not just more redundancy alone.
Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures
- Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions
- Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions
- Determine high-performing database solutions
- Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures
- Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions
This is the broadest domain in the SAA-C03 syllabus, spanning storage class and caching choices, compute options from EC2 to serverless, database selection, network performance, and how data moves into your pipeline before transformation. Because it spans so many services, work through each objective separately rather than treating it as one topic.
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
- Design cost-optimized storage solutions
- Design cost-optimized compute solutions
- Design cost-optimized database solutions
- Design cost-optimized network architectures
Cost questions are rarely about knowing a price; they test whether you can match a workload's actual usage pattern (steady, spiky, or unpredictable) to the pricing model and storage tier that fits it, without giving up the availability or performance the scenario also asks for.
How the hub covers this syllabus
Each page in this hub maps to part of the SAA-C03 exam objectives: the exam format page explains how these domains translate into scored questions, the study plan is weighted by the percentages above, and the sample questions page shows the domains in scenario form. Our own mock reuses this same domain structure so your practice score maps back to this syllabus, not to a different set of topics.
AWS does not publish a per-domain pass requirement — your raw responses across all four domains are combined into a single compensatory score, so a strong Domain 3 answer can offset a weak Domain 4 one. That still means every domain above is fair game on test day, and none of the four is safe to skip.
Before you plan study time by domain, check prerequisites to see whether the recommended background applies to you, and see cost and booking for what a retake costs if you need one.
Exam facts on this page come from Amazon Web Services’s own pages (official exam page). Prices, versions and policies change — confirm there before you book.