SAA-C03: 3-Day AWS Solutions Architect Associate Course

Architecting on AWS Course Overview (SAA-C03)

Architecting on AWS is Amazon's own three-day architecture course, and it is the official curriculum behind SAA-C03, the exam that earns the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification. The course teaches you to get the most out of the AWS Cloud by understanding what each service is actually for and how those services combine into a working solution. The emphasis throughout is on AWS best practices and recommended design patterns, so you leave able to reason about a design rather than recite a service list.

The three days move in the order an architecture is actually built. You start with architecting fundamentals, infrastructure models and the AWS Well-Architected Framework, then account security, identity and resource-based policies, account federation and managing multiple accounts. Networking follows in two parts, from VPC patterns, routing, NACLs and security groups through to VPC peering, endpoints, Transit Gateway, hybrid networking and Route 53. In between come compute and instance selection, storage and S3 storage classes, database services including RDS, DynamoDB and Redshift, monitoring and scaling, automation with CloudFormation and AWS Systems Manager, microservices and containers, serverless architecture, edge services, and backup and recovery planning.

This is the standalone course. It runs three days, and it is the same official Amazon courseware taught inside our two AWS combo camps, where the exam voucher and the certification are included as well.

Who This AWS Architecting Course Is For

Amazon writes this course for solutions architects, solution-design engineers and developers who need a working understanding of AWS architecture, and that is who gets the most from it. It suits solutions architects who own the shape of an AWS workload and have to defend that shape on security, resilience, performance and cost. It suits systems, infrastructure and network engineers whose estate is moving into the cloud, and who now size compute, pick storage classes, lay out VPCs and subnets and decide where data belongs.

It also suits developers and DevOps engineers who deploy onto AWS and want to understand the architecture underneath their application instead of inheriting it, and technical leads who have to review or sign off on someone else's AWS design. Because the course is Amazon's official SAA-C03 curriculum, it is equally the right choice if your employer has specified Architecting on AWS by name as the training to attend.

What You'll Learn in Architecting on AWS (SAA-C03)

The course maps to the four content domains SAA-C03 is scored against, in Amazon's own weightings:

• Design Secure Architectures (30%): the largest domain, covering secure access to AWS resources, secure workloads and applications, and the data security controls that protect information at rest and in transit.
• Design Resilient Architectures (26%): scalable and loosely coupled architectures, and highly available or fault-tolerant designs that keep running when a component does not.
• Design High-Performing Architectures (24%): choosing high-performing storage, elastic compute, database solutions, scalable network architectures, and data ingestion and transformation solutions.
• Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%): sizing storage, compute, databases and networking so that cost is a design input rather than an afterthought.

Official AWS hands-on labs run through all three days, including deploying an EC2 instance with the AWS API tools, building your own Amazon VPC infrastructure, adding a database layer to it, building a serverless architecture, and configuring an Amazon CloudFront distribution over an Amazon S3 origin.

Why Choose This AWS Architecting Course

Three days is the whole point of this format. You get Amazon's official architecture curriculum, delivered live by an instructor Amazon has authorised to teach it, with the labs that come with it, and you are back at work by the end of the week. That is a very different proposition from a self-paced video library, and it is the fastest honest route through this material.

• 3-day instructor-led format, live rather than pre-recorded.
• Taught by an Amazon Authorized Instructor (AAI), not a generalist.
• Official AWS courseware, the Architecting on AWS course itself, not third-party material.
• Official AWS hands-on labs throughout, building real VPCs, database layers, serverless stacks and CloudFront deployments.
• Amazon's official SAA-C03 curriculum, so the training matches the exam it prepares you for.
• Classroom live in Sarasota, FL, or remote classroom live, the same instructor-led class either way.
• Available inside two combo camps if you want the SAA-C03 exam and certification included, paired either with AWS Cloud Practitioner or with the Solutions Architect Professional credential.