AWS SAA-C03 Series — Complete Question Index

A complete AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) question bank, explained the way I wish someone had explained it to me — not just “the answer is B,” but why B beats A, C, and D, and which AWS service behavior the question is really testing.

This series is both a public study resource and my own SAA prep log. I add 10 new questions every day until all 650+ are covered. Each question below links to its own post with the full scenario, correct answer, and a breakdown of the underlying AWS concept.

🟢 New here? Start with Domain 1 and work down — the domains roughly follow the weight they carry on the real exam.

Progress: 40 / 650+ questions published

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📋 Exam Domain Weighting (SAA-C03)

Domain	Weight
Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures	30%
Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures	26%
Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures	24%
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures	20%

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🔐 Domain 1 — Design Secure Architectures

#	Question	Core Service	Link
Q3	Restrict an S3 bucket to only accounts inside an AWS Organization	S3 + Organizations	Read more →
Q4	Give an EC2 instance private access to S3 with no internet	VPC Gateway Endpoint	Read more →
Q11	Minimize operational overhead of EC2-to-Aurora credential management	Secrets Manager	Read more →
Q13	Rotate RDS credentials across multiple Regions, least overhead	Secrets Manager (multi-Region)	Read more →
Q15	Replicate an on-prem inspection server’s traffic filtering in AWS	AWS Network Firewall	Read more →
Q16	Visualize a data lake with tiered access (management vs everyone else)	QuickSight	Read more →
Q17	Let EC2 instances access an S3 bucket the right way	IAM Role	Read more →
Q19	Route all inbound traffic through a third-party firewall appliance	Gateway Load Balancer	Read more →
Q26	Catch unauthorized configuration changes on S3 buckets	AWS Config	Read more →
Q27	Share a CloudWatch dashboard with a user who has no AWS account	CloudWatch Dashboard Sharing	Read more →
Q28	Org-wide SSO while keeping on-prem Active Directory as the source	AWS SSO + AD Trust	Read more →
Q31	Detect untagged EC2/RDS/Redshift resources with minimal effort	AWS Config	Read more →
Q34	Track config changes + API call history for compliance	AWS Config + CloudTrail	Read more →
Q35	Protect a public app behind an ELB from large-scale DDoS	AWS Shield Advanced	Read more →
Q36	Same customer managed KMS key across S3 buckets in two Regions	AWS KMS multi-Region key	Read more →
Q37	Secure, repeatable remote EC2 access with least overhead	Systems Manager Session Manager	Read more →

🛡️ Domain 2 — Design Resilient Architectures

#	Question	Core Service	Link
Q5	Two EC2 instances behind an ALB show different documents	EFS	Read more →
Q7	Fan out bursty messages (100k/sec) to many consumers	SNS + SQS	Read more →
Q8	Modernize a primary/worker-node batch platform	SQS + Auto Scaling	Read more →
Q10	Process ecommerce orders strictly in received order	SQS FIFO + API Gateway	Read more →
Q18	Build a durable, stateless image-compression microservice (Choose Two)	SQS + Lambda	Read more →
Q29	Route a multi-Region UDP VoIP service to the lowest-latency Region with failover	Global Accelerator + NLB	Read more →

⚡ Domain 3 — Design High-Performing Architectures

#	Question	Core Service	Link
Q1	Aggregate 500 GB/day from global sites into one S3 bucket fast	S3 Transfer Acceleration	Read more →
Q21	Serverless flash-sale site handling millions of requests/hour	S3 + CloudFront + Lambda + DynamoDB	Read more →
Q25	Fix a Lambda function hitting concurrency quotas under load	Lambda + SQS (split functions)	Read more →
Q2	Ad-hoc SQL queries on JSON logs in S3, least overhead	Athena	Read more →
Q12	Reduce latency for static and dynamic content globally	CloudFront (multi-origin)	Read more →
Q14	Auto-scale a read-heavy database while keeping high availability	Aurora Auto Scaling	Read more →
Q20	Clone large EBS volumes fast with consistently high I/O	EBS Fast Snapshot Restore	Read more →
Q33	Share millions of transactions in near real time, strip sensitive data	Kinesis Data Streams + Lambda + DynamoDB	Read more →
Q38	Reduce global website latency cost-effectively	CloudFront + S3	Read more →
Q39	Fix slow RDS inserts caused by a storage bottleneck	RDS Provisioned IOPS SSD	Read more →

💰 Domain 4 — Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

#	Question	Core Service	Link
Q6	Migrate 70 TB of NFS video files to S3, minimal bandwidth	Snowball Edge	Read more →
Q9	Extend on-prem SMB storage with lifecycle management	S3 File Gateway	Read more →
Q22	Store media files with unpredictable access patterns at minimum cost	S3 Intelligent-Tiering	Read more →
Q23	Keep backup files forever at the lowest possible cost	S3 Glacier Deep Archive	Read more →
Q24	Diagnose an EC2 cost spike from unwanted vertical scaling	Cost Explorer	Read more →
Q30	Cut costs on a database used only 48 hours a month	RDS Snapshot + Terminate	Read more →
Q32	Most cost-effective way to host a static internal website	Amazon S3	Read more →
Q40	Ingest + archive 1 TB/day of IoT alerts, 14-day retention then Glacier	Kinesis Data Firehose + S3 Lifecycle	Read more →

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How this series works

• Every post follows the same structure: Question → Correct Answer → Why it’s right → Why the distractors are tempting but wrong → Exam tip.
• Questions are tagged by the AWS service(s) they exercise, so you can jump straight to s3, sqs, vpc, etc. via Tags.
• I batch questions in groups of 10 as I work through my own SAA-C03 prep, so this index gets a fresh update daily — bookmark it rather than any single post.

Spotted an error or have a trickier variant of one of these questions? Open an issue on GitHub — corrections make this more useful for everyone studying alongside me.