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Check your readiness for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam with 50 exam-style questions across all four domains, each with an instant explanation. Free to take, with a 90-minute timer that matches the pace of the real exam, and retake it as often as you want.
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Enter your details, then choose a 25-question Quick Test or the full 50-question, 90-minute practice test.
This free AWS Solutions Architect practice test checks your readiness for the SAA-C03 exam with 50 exam-style questions across all four domains, each with an explanation for every answer choice, on a 90-minute timer that mirrors the pace of the real 130-minute exam. Built by Training Camp and drawn from the same objectives we teach in our AWS Solutions Architect Boot Camp. New to the certification? Start with what the AWS Solutions Architect certification is.
The SAA-C03 exam has four weighted domains: Design Secure Architectures (30%), Design Resilient Architectures (26%), Design High-Performing Architectures (24%), and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%). You get 130 minutes for 65 questions, 50 of which are scored and 15 of which are unscored items AWS uses to evaluate future questions. Questions are multiple choice (one correct answer out of four) or multiple response (two or more correct answers out of five or more), and you need a scaled score of 720 on a scale of 100 to 1000 to pass. Scoring is compensatory, so only the overall result matters.
AWS writes the exam for someone with at least a year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS. Almost every question is a scenario: a company has a requirement, two or three of the choices would work, and one detail in the stem (a recovery objective, a cost constraint, a protocol, an operational-overhead requirement) makes one of them the best answer. You are not asked to configure anything, but you are expected to know what each in-scope service does well and what it does not do. The certification is valid for three years.
Take it once without notes to get an honest baseline, then read the explanation for every answer, including the ones you got right. The incorrect-choice explanations are where the distinctions the exam likes to test (security groups versus network ACLs, Multi-AZ versus read replicas, Compute versus EC2 Instance Savings Plans, gateway versus interface endpoints) get spelled out. Study your weakest domain and retake the test in a week. The 90-minute timer over 50 questions keeps you honest about pacing: the real exam gives you 130 minutes for 65 questions, so practice reading the requirement sentence first, eliminating the two choices that miss it, and deciding between the last two in under two minutes.
Domains Covered · SAA-C03
IAM and multi-account access, VPC security layers, encryption, and data protection.
Loose coupling with queues and events, multi-AZ and multi-Region designs, DR strategies.
Storage, compute, database, network and data ingestion choices that meet performance targets.
Storage tiering, purchasing options, right sizing, and network data transfer costs.
Four questions from the bank, one per domain, with the reasoning behind every answer. The full test has 50.
A media company runs its build pipeline in a development AWS account. The pipeline runs under an IAM role and must read deployment artifacts from an S3 bucket in the production account. Security policy prohibits long-lived credentials outside the account that owns them, and the production team must be able to see, from its own account, exactly which principal can read the artifacts. Which solution meets these requirements?
Correct. Cross-account access in AWS is done with an IAM role whose trust policy names the calling principal in the other account, here the pipeline role, and the caller obtains temporary credentials with AWS STS AssumeRole. Nothing long-lived leaves the production account, and the production team owns both the role and its trust policy.
An e-commerce company's web tier calls an order-fulfillment service directly over HTTP. During flash sales the fulfillment servers fall behind and orders are lost when calls time out. The company needs no order to be lost and wants the fulfillment tier to scale on its own backlog. Which solution meets these requirements?
Correct. A queue decouples the producer from the consumer: orders are stored durably in SQS until a worker takes them, and a target-tracking policy on the ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible metric scales the workers to the backlog.
A financial firm is migrating a self-managed Oracle database to Amazon EC2. The storage layer must sustain 120,000 IOPS with consistent sub-millisecond latency on a single volume. Which Amazon EBS volume type meets these requirements?
Correct. io2 Block Express is the highest-performance EBS volume, supporting up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MiB/s per volume with average latency under 500 microseconds. That is the profile a large transactional database on EC2 needs.
A software company stores several petabytes of customer-uploaded files in Amazon S3. Some files are downloaded daily for years, others are never opened again after the first week, and the company cannot predict which is which. It wants to lower storage cost without retrieval fees or any change to how applications access objects. Which storage class should the company use?
Correct. S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves each object between Frequent, Infrequent and Archive Instant Access tiers based on its own access pattern, with no retrieval fees and no application changes, for a small monthly monitoring fee per object.
Every one of the 50 questions works this way: an explanation for the right answer and for the one you picked, so a wrong answer teaches you something. Questions last reviewed against the current AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) objectives.
Quick answers about the test, the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam, and how to prepare.
Yes. Training Camp's AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate practice test is free to take. You get 50 exam-style questions across all four SAA-C03 domains, with a written explanation for every answer choice.
It is 50 multiple-choice scenario questions drawn from all four SAA-C03 domains, with an instant explanation after each answer and a 90-minute timer that mirrors the pace of the real exam. You can retake it as often as you want. Treat it as a readiness check rather than a substitute for full preparation.
The SAA-C03 exam has 65 questions in 130 minutes. Fifty of them are scored and 15 are unscored items that AWS uses to evaluate future questions. You will not know which are which, so answer every question as if it counts.
You need a scaled score of 720 on a scale of 100 to 1000. Scoring is compensatory, so you do not need to pass each domain individually, only the exam as a whole. The exam costs 150 USD.
The four domains are Design Secure Architectures (30%), Design Resilient Architectures (26%), Design High-Performing Architectures (24%), and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%). Security is the largest, and most of it is about IAM, multi-account guardrails, VPC controls and encryption.
It is a step up from AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. Instead of recognizing what a service does, you choose between two designs that both work and pick the one that meets a stated requirement most cost-effectively or with the least operational overhead. Candidates who have built on AWS find the reading load and the number of similar services the hardest part.
There are no formal prerequisites. AWS recommends at least one year of hands-on experience designing solutions on AWS, and that experience shows in the exam: the scenarios assume you have seen a VPC, an Auto Scaling group and an RDS instance in practice. Hands-on labs during your study can stand in for job experience.
Start with the SAA-C03 exam guide and learn, for every in-scope service, the one requirement it satisfies better than its neighbors. Then use practice questions like these to find your weak domains. If you want a structured path with an instructor and your exam voucher included, our AWS Solutions Architect Boot Camp covers all four domains.