AWS Solution Architect Associate Notes
Welcome to the documentation for the AWS Solution Architect Associate certification. These notes are organized by Exam Weight, allowing you to focus on the high-probability topics first.
🚨 Priority 1: The "Big 5" (Master These First)
Goal: Spend 60% of your revision time here. If you fail these, you fail the exam.
Networking and Content Delivery
- Amazon VPC
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon CloudFront
- Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
- AWS Direct Connect
- AWS Global Accelerator
- AWS PrivateLink
- AWS Site-to-Site VPN
- AWS Transit Gateway
- AWS Client VPN
Compute
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS Batch
- AWS Outposts
- AWS Serverless Application Repository
- VMware Cloud on AWS
- AWS Wavelength
Storage
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
- Amazon FSx (for all types)
- AWS Storage Gateway
- AWS Backup
Database
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon Aurora
- Amazon Aurora Serverless
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
- Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
- Amazon Neptune
- Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB)
Security, Identity, and Compliance
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
- Amazon Cognito
- AWS WAF
- AWS Shield
- AWS Secrets Manager
- AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS Single Sign-On)
- AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
- Amazon GuardDuty
- AWS Security Hub
- AWS Network Firewall
- AWS Firewall Manager
- AWS Directory Service
- AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)
- Amazon Inspector
- Amazon Macie
- AWS Artifact
- AWS Audit Manager
- AWS CloudHSM
- Amazon Detective
🧩 Priority 2: Architecture & Decoupling
Goal: Understand how to connect services together (Serverless, Queues, Containers).
Serverless
Application Integration
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
- AWS Step Functions
- Amazon EventBridge
- Amazon AppFlow
- Amazon MQ
Containers
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
- Amazon ECS Anywhere
- Amazon EKS Anywhere
- Amazon EKS Distro
⚙️ Priority 3: Operations & Migration
Goal: Easy points. Focus on DataSync, CloudWatch, and Organizations.
Migration and Transfer
- AWS DataSync
- AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
- AWS Snow Family
- AWS Transfer Family
- AWS Application Discovery Service
- AWS Application Migration Service
- AWS Migration Hub
Management and Governance
- Amazon CloudWatch
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS Organizations
- AWS Systems Manager
- AWS Config
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS Control Tower
- AWS Compute Optimizer
- AWS Service Catalog
- AWS Health Dashboard
- AWS License Manager
- Amazon Managed Grafana
- Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
- AWS Management Console
- AWS Proton
- AWS Well-Architected Tool
AWS Cost Management
🔍 Priority 4: Keyword Match Only
Goal: Don't overstudy. Just know the 1-sentence definition of each service.
Analytics
- Amazon Athena
- Amazon Redshift
- AWS Glue
- Amazon Kinesis
- Amazon OpenSearch Service
- Amazon EMR
- Amazon QuickSight
- AWS Data Exchange
- AWS Data Pipeline
- AWS Lake Formation
- Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
Front-End Web and Mobile
Machine Learning
- Amazon SageMaker
- Amazon Rekognition
- Amazon Transcribe
- Amazon Polly
- Amazon Comprehend
- Amazon Lex
- Amazon Translate
- Amazon Forecast
- Amazon Fraud Detector
- Amazon Kendra
- Amazon Textract