AWS SAA-C03

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Certification⌗

At the beginning of 2026, I worked towards my AWS certification. Earlier, I did my GCP certification, as you can read in my GCP ACE blog post.

The reason to consider the AWS certification as well started from a change at work: the decision had been taken somewhere in 2025 to shift the company from GCP to AWS as the main cloud platform. As part of that, the idea was that all devs would join in a weekly routine where we would try to follow an online learning path by Pluralsight¹. Ideally, some of us would then also take the AWS certification exam, since it would be a tangible goal to work towards. Naturally, I followed along in all those sessions.

At the end of those sessions, I didn’t immediately take the exam, since I didn’t feel well-prepared (I was basically too involved with another side project). For the beginning of 2026, I figured the time was right to pick up the pace again and focus solely on the exam.

The AWS certification levels follow a similar reasoning as those for GCP. There are basically again 3 + 1 levels:

• foundational: entrance levels, also for non-technical levels
• associate: technical level, all-round fundamental skills
• professional: advanced role-based certifications
• specialty: specific technical domains

Compared to GCP, there is also an associate developer certification, but quite early on, we decided to go in the direction of the Solutions Architect certification. This certification focuses more on the holistic picture, getting to know the different services, whereas the developer is really more tailored towards work as an application developer.

Having done the GCP certification before and just having practical day-to-day hands-on experience with GCP meant that a lot of the concepts were already quite familiar to me. For a great deal of services that GCP provides, AWS almost always has an equivalent.

My general feeling though is that AWS for some things has more managed services and that they also integrate better than what I was used to in GCP. I particularly find the serverless offering in AWS a lot better, certainly when thinking e.g. about AWS lambda.

How did I prepare?⌗

As mentioned in the intro, my main first focus point in 2025 was the Pluralsight AWS learning paths. It was a sequence of 5 learning paths, i.e. sequence of courses all centered around a specific portion of AWS (e.g compute, storage, scaling, …) Each of those also contained what were called Labs, which are essentially guided exercises to carry out in a managed AWS on-the-fly sandbox accounts. For each of those courses, I had also taken the time to summarize basically each of the course wrap-sessions. New now was that I could use LLMs to assist me in building this set of course notes.

By the time I started my reboot of 2026, the 2025 course had been revamped by Pluralsight. Even though perhaps not completely necessary, I also took the full 2026 version of the updated course in the end.

Apart from the Pluralsight material, I also looked into the AWS official exam guide. It clearly lists the 4 main sections and focus points of the exam. Another source that AWS provides is AWS Skill Builder. Skill Builder is a very broad platform put forward by AWS itself and also has courses, practice exams and overviews, both paid and free. I found it useful in the sense that it contained a video overview of the official exam guide. Additionally, it also featured some practice exams. Two whitepapers the exam guide also recommends you to look into are the AWS well-architected framework and AWS security. I’ve found the well-architected framework follows the exam structure (or the other way around) quite well. It’s also generally an interesting document since it communicates the spirit of working with AWS, beyond any certification.

The key way to prepare however are practice exams. They give you a good insight on how the exam is structured and doing a lot of those typically reveals recurring themes and things to look out for. The Pluralsight platform provided a large selection of practice questions to go through. Next to those, there are also other practice resources out there, though I would be careful to stick to legitimate material. In this instance as well, I really leveraged LLMs to help me solve questions and get more in-depth details in case of follow-up questions.

I also looked into finding a proper book as a study guide, e.g. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA-C03 Exam by Ben Piper. The reviews for those weren’t too good though, so I didn’t further look into this one.

One advantage of leaving a year between my first run through the Pluralsight courses and the second one was that I also had the time to gain more hands-on experience at work on AWS. Additionally, I also already had some experience with GCP, which I feel was quite transferable to some extent.

What’s the exam like?⌗

The exam consists of 65 questions, of which 50 are scored and 15 are unscored. The unscored questions are new test questions which are added. Obviously, you are not told which question is scored or unscored …

There’s a possibility to do the exam online or on-site in an exam center. I chose to do the exam on-site, since that means I didn’t need to bother myself to comply with all exam regulations (it’s basically handled by the exam center).

Question types include multiple choice and multiple response.

The exam covers 4 domains:

1. secure architectures
2. resilient architectures
3. high-performing architectures
4. cost-optimized architectures

Important to know is that each question is linked to one domain and the scores are weighed across the domains.

The passing score is 720 / 1000 of the weighted score.

How did I do on the exam?⌗

I passed!

Unlike the GCP exam, I now also got a score, being 856 / 1000.

I think I was overall well prepared, but the main struggle I still found at times that this format of exam is at some point really about guessing the intent of it. Depending on said intent, different answers can be valid at the same time.

Practical advice for preparing⌗

Practical experience with cloud-based environments helps a great deal. The fact I already had hands-on experience through my job with GCP and AWS means I already knew most of the technologies. From my point of view though, I don’t really use all of those services. Additionally, if I do, it’s also through some infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), which is a different premise than what the exam presupposes.

Understanding what’s on the exam also helps, so be sure to e.g. look up the AWS official exam guide. The whitepapers, even though interesting, I don’t think were really that relevant.

The Pluralsight learning paths were also interesting to get a good overview on the theoretical part. Regarding theory, I would say that it’s quite important to know some numbers / orders of magnitude. Good examples of these are the different kinds of block storage, object storage, compute, … and their related pricing.

Compared to the GCP exam, I did not prepare with a book this time. I would say that the Pluralsight courses basically took that function this time.

The key ingredient I would still say though is to do a lot of practice questions. Generally, learning by heart is discouraged, but my personal feeling is that doing the questions just prepares you well for the format of the exam. Additionally, after doing a lot of those, you would typically see a lot of recurring themes, which then makes it easier to spot it on the exam.

Conclusions⌗

How do I think about having achieved this certification as well? Well, overall, I have to admit I feel a bit mixed about it in hindsight.

There are the clear advantages in that it aids me in my day-to-day job, potentially my longer-term career. Another reason I started again on this was to prove to myself that I could commit to this and reach a tangible goal.

After having achieved it though, I wonder if there’s that much added value to it. My experience with GCP is to a large extent transferable to AWS as well, so doing another certification was likely less necessary. Additionally, I don’t really feel it’s the main direction I want to evolve into anyway for my career, since I’m more interested in application development.

I do believe in this notion of DevOps – the original one, where application developers can handle their own infra – not the one with Ops people reinventing themselves with a new term. But that topic is perhaps something for a different post …