SAA-C03 is organised into four design-focused domains. This is a plain-English summary with weightings; the official AWS exam guide is authoritative.
| # | Domain | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Design Secure Architectures | 30% |
| 2 | Design Resilient Architectures | 26% |
| 3 | Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% |
| 4 | Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% |
Domain 1 — Design Secure Architectures (30%)
Secure access with IAM (roles, policies, least privilege), data protection and encryption (KMS), and secure network design (VPC, security groups, NACLs, private subnets, endpoints).
Domain 2 — Design Resilient Architectures (26%)
Highly available and fault-tolerant designs across Availability Zones, decoupling with SQS and SNS, Auto Scaling, and backup and recovery strategies.
Domain 3 — Design High-Performing Architectures (24%)
Selecting performant compute, storage, database and networking options, plus caching (ElastiCache) and content delivery (CloudFront) for scale and speed.
Domain 4 — Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%)
Right-sizing resources, choosing storage classes and lifecycle policies, and selecting cost-effective pricing models (On-Demand, Reserved, Savings Plans, Spot).