AWS
Free AWS SAA-C03 Practice Questions
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam is up to 65 questions in 130 minutes, and the voucher costs $150. CertCrush provides 650 syllabus-aligned practice questions across all 4 exam domains, each with a full explanation. Free to try, no account required.
Scenario-based practice for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam (SAA-C03). Every question is a short architecture problem with a stated constraint, and every explanation says why the tempting wrong answer fails as well as why the right one wins.
Practice content last updated · Independently written and aligned to AWS’s published exam objectives.
10
Sample questions
130 min
Exam time limit
72%
Practice pass mark
$150
Exam voucher
About the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) Exam
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) is the AWS certification most cloud engineers sit first, and the one hiring managers actually recognise. You get 65 questions in 130 minutes and a scaled score out of 1,000, with 720 to pass. Fifteen of those questions are unscored trial items that look identical to the rest, so pacing is part of the test: about two minutes per question, all the way through. What fails candidates is rarely the service list. Almost every item is a short scenario with four plausible options where two of them would technically work and only one meets the constraint written into the question. "With the least operational overhead" is asking for the managed service. "Without changing the application code" rules out anything that needs an SDK call. "Must survive the loss of an Availability Zone" separates Multi-AZ from read replicas. People who revise by memorising service descriptions read all four options as correct and then guess. The blueprint has four domains: Design Secure Architectures at 30 percent, Design Resilient Architectures at 26, Design High-Performing Architectures at 24, and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures at 20. Security is the biggest block, and most of it is IAM policy evaluation, VPC boundaries, and where encryption keys live, not anything exotic. AWS suggests around a year of hands-on experience designing solutions on the platform. If you have that and you still miss questions, the gap is almost always reading the constraint rather than knowing the service.
Exam Domains Covered
Exam Format & Details
65 questions in 130 minutes, all multiple choice (one correct answer of four) or multiple response (two or more correct answers of five or more). Only 50 questions are scored; the other 15 are unscored trial items that are not identified on the exam, so treat all 65 as real. Results come back as a scaled score from 100 to 1,000 with 720 to pass, and the model is compensatory: you do not have to pass each domain, only the exam overall. There are no labs, simulations or drag-and-drop items. The seat costs 150 USD and is booked through Pearson VUE or PSI at a test centre or online.
Why Practice Questions Matter
Reading about S3 storage classes will not teach you to recognise which one a scenario is describing. SAA-C03 questions are decided in one constraint sentence, and the only way to train for that is to read a lot of scenarios and have the misses explained. Every question here gives the reasoning for the correct answer and, more usefully, why each distractor fails: why Multi-AZ is not a read-scaling answer, why a NAT gateway is not a security control, why Glacier Deep Archive breaks a four-hour recovery target. Work by domain first, then run timed sets of 65 in 130 minutes so pacing stops being a variable on the day.
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Sample Practice Questions
The following questions are a preview of the type of syllabus-aligned questions you will practise in CertCrush. They reflect the format and reasoning style of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam — not actual exam content.
Q1.A logistics company runs application servers in private subnets across two Availability Zones. The servers write about 8 TB of shipment tracking logs to an Amazon S3 bucket in the same Region every month, and that traffic currently reaches S3 through a NAT gateway. The monthly invoice shows a large NAT gateway data processing charge. The company wants to eliminate that charge for the S3 traffic at the lowest possible cost. What should the solutions architect do?
- A.Create a gateway VPC endpoint for Amazon S3 and add routes to it in the private subnet route tables.
- B.Create an interface VPC endpoint for Amazon S3 in each Availability Zone.
- C.Move the application servers into public subnets and assign each server an Elastic IP address.
- D.Replace the NAT gateway with a NAT instance running on a smaller EC2 instance type.
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q2.A retail company's monthly AWS bill has climbed steadily for the past four months. The finance director wants to see which AWS services account for the growth and how the trend is likely to continue, using an interactive view she can group and filter herself. She does not need to be notified about anything. Which service should the solutions architect point her to?
- A.AWS Cost Explorer
- B.AWS Budgets
- C.The AWS Cost and Usage Report
- D.AWS Pricing Calculator
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q3.A software startup gives each engineering team its own monthly cloud spending target. The head of platform wants an email to arrive automatically when a team's spend is projected to exceed its target before the month ends, so that the team can act while there is still time. Which service meets this requirement?
- A.AWS Budgets
- B.AWS Cost Explorer
- C.AWS Trusted Advisor
- D.The AWS Cost and Usage Report
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q4.An insurance group charges internal business units for the AWS resources they consume. The accounting team needs raw line-item records at hourly and individual resource granularity, delivered somewhere it can query them with Amazon Athena and build dashboards in Amazon QuickSight. Which solution meets these requirements?
- A.Enable an AWS Cost and Usage Report delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket and query it with Athena.
- B.Use AWS Cost Explorer and group the results by linked account and service.
- C.Create an AWS Budget for each business unit and export the alert history.
- D.Download the monthly summary from the Billing and Cost Management dashboard each month.
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q5.A charity has accumulated hundreds of EC2 instances, EBS volumes and load balancers over three years of unmanaged growth. Nobody can say which resources are idle or which instances are far larger than their workload requires. The board wants a list of specific resources to switch off or shrink, based on observed utilisation, with as little manual investigation as possible. What should the solutions architect do?
- A.Review the AWS Trusted Advisor cost optimisation checks together with AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations.
- B.Create an AWS Budget for each resource type and act on the alerts.
- C.Use AWS Cost Explorer grouped by Region to identify the idle resources.
- D.Write a custom script that polls CloudWatch metrics and reports low utilisation.
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q6.A ticketing platform moved most of its outbound traffic behind a gateway VPC endpoint and cut the volume passing through its NAT gateway by more than 90 percent. The following month the NAT gateway line item fell but did not disappear, even in a week when almost no traffic crossed it. The operations lead asks why a charge remains. Which explanation is correct?
- A.A NAT gateway is billed by the hour for its existence in addition to the per-gigabyte data processing charge.
- B.A NAT gateway has a minimum monthly data processing commitment that is billed regardless of usage.
- C.The charge is for the Elastic IP address associated with the NAT gateway, not the gateway itself.
- D.Internal health check traffic still passes through the NAT gateway and is billed as data processing.
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q7.A software vendor distributes large product installers to customers worldwide directly from an Amazon S3 bucket in one Region. Internet egress is now the largest single line on the invoice, and many customers download the same handful of files. The vendor wants to cut the cost of serving that content without changing where the files are stored. Which solution meets this requirement most cost-effectively?
- A.Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as its origin.
- B.Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket.
- C.Replicate the bucket into several Regions closer to the customers.
- D.Serve the installers from EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer.
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q8.A manufacturing company is planning a new three-tier application that will run on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer with an Amazon RDS database. Nothing has been deployed yet. The project sponsor wants a written cost estimate for the proposed architecture before approving the build. Which service should the solutions architect use to produce the estimate?
- A.AWS Pricing Calculator
- B.AWS Cost Explorer
- C.AWS Budgets
- D.AWS Compute Optimizer
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q9.A healthcare analytics company runs ingestion workers in private subnets. The workers publish records to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and read parameters from AWS Systems Manager, and all of that traffic currently exits through a NAT gateway. Compliance now requires that the traffic must never traverse the public internet, and the company also wants to stop paying NAT gateway data processing on it. Which solution meets these requirements?
- A.Create interface VPC endpoints for Kinesis Data Streams and Systems Manager in the subnets where the workers run.
- B.Create gateway VPC endpoints for Kinesis Data Streams and Systems Manager and add routes to them.
- C.Deploy a second NAT gateway so that the traffic is spread across two Availability Zones.
- D.Route the traffic over a Site-to-Site VPN to the corporate data centre and out to the services from there.
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Q10.A university research group uploads roughly 20 TB of instrument readings from its campus network into an Amazon S3 bucket each month. Analysis runs on EC2 instances in the same Region, and researchers download only a few gigabytes of summary files to their laptops. The finance office is preparing a budget and needs to know which direction of this traffic will appear as a data transfer charge. Which statement correctly describes how AWS bills this traffic?
- A.Data transfer into AWS from the internet is generally free, and the summary files downloaded to the internet are charged per gigabyte.
- B.Both the 20 TB uploaded and the summary files downloaded are charged per gigabyte at the same rate.
- C.The 20 TB uploaded is charged per gigabyte and the summary files downloaded to the internet are free.
- D.Neither direction is charged, because the bucket and the EC2 instances are in the same Region.
Domain: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is included in the free AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) sample?
The free sample includes 10 syllabus-aligned practice questions, sample flashcards, and a preview chapter from the study guide. No account or payment is required to try the sample.
How many questions are in the full AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) course?
The full course includes a comprehensive question bank covering all exam domains. You can see the total question count on the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) course page.
Are these official AWS exam questions?
No. CertCrush questions are independently written and syllabus-aligned — they mirror the format, difficulty, and reasoning style of the official exam. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS.
Which domains does the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) course cover?
The course covers 4 exam domains: Design Secure Architectures, Design Resilient Architectures, Design High-Performing Architectures, Design Cost-Optimized Architectures.
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Yes. CertCrush is fully responsive and works on phones, tablets, and desktops. The timed exam, flashcards, and study guide all work on mobile without installing an app.
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