I scored 825/1000 on the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam — but only after making every mistake in the book. Here’s what I wish I knew before wasting 40+ hours on useless study tactics.
📌 1. The Exam is Scenario-Based (Not Fact Recall)
What I Thought: “I need to memorize every AWS service and its limits.”
Reality: 80% of questions are real-world scenarios like:
”Your company needs a multi-region database with the lowest latency. Which service combo should you use?”
Tip: Focus on use cases for:
✅ S3 (storage tiers, lifecycle policies)
✅ EC2 (instance types, spot vs. reserved)
✅ RDS vs. DynamoDB (when to use each, key differences)
📌 2. Skip These Low-Yield Topics
Wasted time on AWS Snowball, OpsWorks, and Mechanical Turk — zero questions on them.
Priority Topics:
🔴 High: VPC, IAM, S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, EFS, FSx (Underrated!)
🟡 Medium: CloudFront, SQS/SNS, KMS, DirectConnect
⚫ Low: AWS Organizations, WorkSpaces
📌 3. The “Rule of 5” for VPCs
VPC questions are 20%+ of the exam. Master:
Subnets (public vs. private)
NAT Gateway vs. Instance (cost vs. control)
Security Groups (stateful) vs. NACLs (stateless)
VPC Peering (no transitive routing!)
Direct Connect vs. VPN (speed vs. cost)
For the last 2 and final tips, checkout my full article on Medium :)
Don't worry its not behind a paywall, click below! :P
Medium
