AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) Online Training & Certification Prep
Master the skills required to design resilient, cost-optimised, and high-performing AWS architectures. This hands-on course prepares you for the SAA-C03 exam across all four official domains, featuring Live Labs in real AWS environments and instruction from AWS Certified Partner instructors.
Course Overview
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) is one of the most widely recognised credentials in cloud computing. It validates the ability to design and deploy secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimised architectures on AWS — skills directly applicable to roles including Cloud Architect, Solutions Architect, and Senior Cloud Engineer.
This Boost eLearning course delivers the full SAA-C03 curriculum through Live Labs, expert video instruction, and scenario-based practice exams. Live Labs place you inside real AWS environments — not simulations — so you can build VPC architectures, configure Auto Scaling groups, implement cross-Region replication on S3, and troubleshoot IAM permission boundaries using the same console and CLI tools you will use on the job.
The course covers the four SAA-C03 exam domains in depth. In the design secure architectures domain you will implement identity federation with IAM Identity Center, enforce encryption at rest and in transit across services, and apply AWS network security controls including security groups, network ACLs, AWS WAF, and AWS Shield Advanced. The design resilient architectures domain addresses multi-AZ and multi-Region patterns, Route 53 routing policies, RDS Multi-AZ and Read Replicas, and the trade-offs between synchronous and asynchronous decoupling using SQS, SNS, and Amazon EventBridge.
Performance domain coverage includes selecting appropriate EC2 instance families, configuring ElastiCache caching layers, choosing between Amazon Aurora Serverless and provisioned clusters, and applying S3 Transfer Acceleration and CloudFront caching behaviours. The cost-optimisation domain ties together Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Fleet configuration, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and Compute Optimizer recommendations.
Architecture design is practised through case-study modules that present realistic business requirements — a media streaming platform, a financial services data pipeline, a multi-tenant SaaS application — and ask you to select and justify AWS service choices against the Well-Architected Framework. Instruction is delivered by instructors who hold current AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional status. Enrolment includes the Boost Pass Guarantee.
What You'll Learn
- Design multi-tier architectures using EC2, VPC, ELB, and Auto Scaling for high availability and fault tolerance
- Implement secure access controls using IAM roles, policies, permission boundaries, and IAM Identity Center
- Configure Amazon S3 storage classes, lifecycle policies, replication, and access controls for diverse data requirements
- Select appropriate database services — RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Redshift — based on workload characteristics
- Build hybrid connectivity solutions using AWS VPN, AWS Direct Connect, and Transit Gateway
- Design event-driven and decoupled architectures using SQS, SNS, Lambda, and Amazon EventBridge
- Apply Route 53 routing policies (failover, geolocation, latency, weighted) to meet availability and performance requirements
- Optimise costs by choosing the appropriate EC2 purchasing model, S3 storage tier, and serverless compute option
- Implement data protection strategies including KMS encryption, S3 Object Lock, and AWS Backup
- Evaluate architectural trade-offs against the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
- Design disaster recovery strategies meeting defined RTO and RPO targets
- Migrate workloads using AWS Database Migration Service, Application Migration Service, and DataSync
Who This Course Is For
- Cloud engineers and system administrators designing or managing AWS workloads
- Solutions architects moving from on-premises to cloud-native design patterns
- DevOps engineers seeking deeper AWS architecture knowledge
- Software engineers taking on infrastructure responsibility in cloud-native teams
- IT professionals who hold AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and are progressing to Associate level
Course Outline
- SAA-C03 exam structure and domain weighting
- AWS Well-Architected Framework: six pillars in an architect's context
- Choosing between single-AZ, multi-AZ, and multi-Region patterns
- Overview of the AWS shared responsibility model for architects
- AWS service limits and how to plan around them
- IAM deep dive: roles, policies, permission boundaries, and resource-based policies
- IAM Identity Center (SSO) for multi-account federation
- Amazon VPC security: security groups, network ACLs, VPC Flow Logs
- AWS WAF, AWS Shield Standard and Advanced, Amazon GuardDuty
- Encryption at rest: KMS key types, CMKs, and service integrations
- Encryption in transit: TLS, ACM certificates, and enforcing HTTPS
- AWS Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store for credential management
- Live Lab: Create a multi-account IAM Identity Center setup with permission sets
- EC2 Auto Scaling groups: launch templates, scaling policies, and lifecycle hooks
- Elastic Load Balancing: ALB, NLB, and GWLB use cases and routing rules
- Amazon Route 53 routing policies: failover, latency, geolocation, geoproximity, weighted, multivalue
- RDS Multi-AZ deployments and Aurora Global Databases for cross-Region resiliency
- Asynchronous decoupling: SQS standard and FIFO queues, dead-letter queues
- Pub/sub patterns with Amazon SNS and Amazon EventBridge
- Disaster recovery patterns: RTO/RPO targets and service selection
- Live Lab: Configure an ALB with EC2 Auto Scaling across two Availability Zones
- EC2 instance families: compute-optimised, memory-optimised, storage-optimised, accelerated computing
- Amazon EBS volume types: gp3, io2, st1, sc1 u2014 performance characteristics and cost
- Amazon EFS and FSx for Windows File Server vs FSx for Lustre
- Amazon CloudFront: cache behaviours, origin shield, Lambda@Edge vs CloudFront Functions
- Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and Memcached caching patterns
- Amazon DynamoDB: partition key design, DAX, global tables, on-demand vs provisioned capacity
- AWS Global Accelerator vs CloudFront u2014 selecting the right service
- Live Lab: Deploy a CloudFront distribution with custom cache behaviours and origin failover
- EC2 purchasing models: On-Demand, Standard and Convertible Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances and Spot Fleet
- S3 storage classes: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, Glacier Deep Archive
- Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies and cost modelling
- AWS Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer recommendations
- Serverless cost comparison: Lambda vs Fargate vs EC2 for variable workloads
- Data transfer cost optimisation: VPC endpoints, S3 Transfer Acceleration, Direct Connect pricing
- Live Lab: Analyse a workload with AWS Compute Optimizer and apply a rightsizing recommendation
- VPC design: CIDR planning, public/private subnets, NAT gateways, and VPC endpoints
- VPC peering vs AWS Transit Gateway for multi-VPC connectivity
- AWS Site-to-Site VPN and AWS Client VPN
- AWS Direct Connect: dedicated and hosted connections, Link Aggregation Groups
- AWS PrivateLink for exposing services without VPC peering
- IPv6 adoption in VPC architectures
- Live Lab: Build a hub-and-spoke Transit Gateway architecture with route table isolation
- Amazon S3 advanced features: Replication (CRR/SRR), Object Lock, MFA Delete, Access Points
- AWS DataSync and AWS Transfer Family for data movement
- Choosing a database: RDS vs Aurora vs DynamoDB vs Redshift vs Neptune vs DocumentDB
- Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 scaling behaviour
- AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) and Schema Conversion Tool (SCT)
- Live Lab: Configure S3 Cross-Region Replication and validate object-level replication with versioning
- SAA-C03 scenario question strategy and common distractors
- Case study: three-tier web application u2014 selecting load balancing, database, caching, and CDN
- Case study: data lake on S3 with Athena, Glue, and Lake Formation
- Full-length timed practice exam (65 questions)
- Domain-by-domain score review and targeted remediation
About the Certification Exam
- Exam code
- SAA-C03
- Length
- 130 minutes
- Questions
- 65 scored questions (multiple choice and multiple response)
- Passing score
- 720 out of 1000
- Exam cost
- ~$150 USD
- Where
- Pearson VUE / PSI online proctored or at an authorised testing centre
The certification exam fee is paid separately to the testing provider and is not included in the course price unless stated otherwise.
Live Labs Included
Hands-on practice on real environments
This course includes Live Labs — direct access to real hardware and cloud environments so you build the skills the exam actually tests.
- Build a custom VPC with public and private subnets, internet gateway, NAT gateway, and route tables; launch EC2 instances in each subnet and validate connectivity
- Configure an Application Load Balancer with path-based routing rules targeting two separate EC2 Auto Scaling groups with lifecycle hooks
- Create an IAM Identity Center instance, configure a permission set with least-privilege policies, and assign it to an AWS account
- Deploy an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ instance, simulate an AZ failure using a reboot with failover, and measure failover time
- Set up S3 Cross-Region Replication between two buckets in different Regions with versioning enabled and validate that objects and deletions replicate correctly
- Deploy a CloudFront distribution backed by an S3 origin with custom cache behaviours, HTTPS enforcement via ACM, and a WAF WebACL with managed rule groups
Pass Guarantee Included
Complete this course and if you don't pass the certification exam on your first attempt, we'll refund your course fee or give you a free retake — your choice.
