AWS Solutions Architect – Associate syllabus

Associate certification for designing secure, resilient, high-performing and cost-optimised architectures on AWS: 65 questions in 130 minutes, scaled 100–1000, pass mark 720.

Design Secure Architectures

30% of scored content · Within the 130 minutes

Multiple choice is one correct option out of four. Multiple response is two or more correct options out of five or more. The exam guide does not publish partial credit.

  • Secure access: IAM users, groups, roles and policies, federation, IAM Identity Center, least privilege, multi-account controls
  • Secure workloads: VPC segmentation, security groups, network ACLs, endpoints, WAF, Shield, private connectivity
  • Data protection: encryption at rest and in transit, key management, secrets, classification, backup and retention

Design Resilient Architectures

26% of scored content · Within the 130 minutes

Same item types and marking as the rest of the exam.

  • Loose coupling, queues, events, serverless patterns, stateless tiers and independent scaling
  • High availability across Availability Zones, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery matched to RPO and RTO

Design High-Performing Architectures

24% of scored content · Within the 130 minutes

Same item types and marking as the rest of the exam.

  • Storage, compute and database choices for throughput, latency and elasticity
  • Network performance, edge delivery, and data ingestion and transformation

Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

20% of scored content · Within the 130 minutes

Same item types and marking as the rest of the exam.

  • Storage tiering and lifecycle, compute purchasing and right-sizing, database capacity, and network paths that avoid unnecessary data transfer