AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03): Design It Hands-On: Prepares you for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam: narrated animated architectures, a simulated AWS console to build in, scenario questions in the exam's style and full mock exams

Name: AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03): Design It Hands-On
Price: 5 USD

A complete, practice-first preparation course for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam, built from AWS's official exam guide. Every lesson opens with a narrated, animated video that builds a real architecture on screen, often in a simulated AWS console, then you read the chapter, learn the exam traps, answer scenario questions in the exam's style with full explanations, and build and fix architectures in a simulated AWS account that Bartman checks: least-privilege IAM and cross-account roles, private VPCs with endpoints, encrypted and versioned storage, decoupled queues and events, Multi-AZ databases, load balancers and more, with no AWS bill. Covers all four exam domains: secure, resilient, high-performing and cost-optimized architectures. Includes the SAA-C03 mock exams and a readiness score per exam domain. Bartman is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services.

12 modules · 48 lessons · 572 practice questions · Intermediate · first module free, then $5

What you'll learn

Read an SAA-C03 scenario, find the real requirement, and eliminate the look-alike answers.
Design least-privilege access across accounts with IAM, Organizations, SCPs and IAM Identity Center.
Secure workloads with private subnets, security groups, endpoints, WAF, Shield and the right managed security services.
Protect data with KMS, encryption in transit, S3 controls, backups and retention.
Decouple systems with SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, API Gateway and Lambda.
Build highly available and fault-tolerant designs with Multi-AZ, Auto Scaling, load balancers, Route 53 and the four DR strategies.
Choose high-performing storage, compute, database, network and data-ingestion services for a workload.
Design for cost: storage tiers, purchase options, rightsizing, database and data-transfer costs.

Syllabus

The architect's mindset and the exam — How SAA-C03 is built and how to read its scenarios, the Well-Architected pillars as trade-offs, Regions and Availability Zones for availability and disaster recovery, and the service map you will design with.
Design secure access — How IAM evaluates every request, a multi-account strategy with AWS Organizations, SCPs and Control Tower, cross-account roles and federation with IAM Identity Center and Cognito, and least-privilege patterns with MFA conditions, ABAC and IAM Access Analyzer.
Design secure workloads and applications — Secure a VPC in layers (public, app and data subnets, NAT per AZ, chained security groups, network ACLs, Session Manager), reach AWS services privately with gateway and interface endpoints and PrivateLink, stop external threats with WAF, Shield and CloudFront, detect them with GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie and Security Hub, and handle application secrets and sign-in with Secrets Manager, Parameter Store and Cognito.
Determine appropriate data security controls — Design encryption at rest with AWS KMS (key types, key policies, grants, rotation, multi-Region keys, CloudHSM), encrypt every hop in transit with TLS, ACM and encrypted hybrid links, protect S3 data with Block Public Access, Object Ownership, policies, versioning, Object Lock and replication, and keep provable backups and audit evidence with AWS Backup, RDS snapshots, CloudTrail data events and AWS Config.
Design loosely coupled architectures — Decouple with SQS queues, fan out with SNS and route events with EventBridge, build serverless APIs and workflows with API Gateway, Lambda and Step Functions, and choose between ECS, Fargate, EKS and Lambda for microservices.
Elastic compute and load balancing — EC2 Auto Scaling policies, warm pools and health checks, choosing and tuning Application, Network and Gateway Load Balancers, caching with ElastiCache, CloudFront and DAX, and choosing between Lambda, Fargate, EC2, Batch and HPC designs.
Design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures — Multi-AZ by design, Route 53 routing policies and health checks, the four disaster recovery strategies with RTO and RPO, and copying data across Regions with S3, DynamoDB, Aurora and RDS.
High-performing and scalable storage — S3 at scale with prefixes, multipart, Transfer Acceleration and Express One Zone; EBS volume types, IOPS and throughput; EFS and the FSx family; and hybrid storage and data movement with Storage Gateway, DataSync, Transfer Family and Snowball.
High-performing databases — Scale relational databases with read replicas, Aurora endpoints, Serverless v2 and RDS Proxy; design DynamoDB keys, capacity and indexes with DAX, streams and TTL; cache with ElastiCache and MemoryDB; and choose the right purpose-built database.
Network and data-ingestion architectures — Plan VPC address space and subnet tiers; connect networks with peering, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink and VPC Lattice; design hybrid and edge connectivity; size streaming ingestion with Kinesis, Data Firehose, MSK and SQS; and turn a data lake into analytics with Glue, Athena, Lake Formation, EMR and Redshift.
Design cost-optimized architectures — Storage classes and lifecycle, gp3 and snapshot archiving; Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot and rightsizing; Aurora Serverless v2, caching and DynamoDB capacity modes; NAT gateways, gateway endpoints, CloudFront and Direct Connect versus VPN.
Exam readiness: case studies and final review — Three case studies reviewed across all four domains (a three-tier web app, a data and analytics platform, a migration with hybrid networking), then exam strategy and a mixed final review.