Practice for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam (65 questions, 130 min, pass 720/1000, scaled). This pack holds 260 original exam-style scenarios across the four exam domains (65 in each of Design Secure Architectures, Design Resilient Architectures, Design High-Performing Architectures and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures), spread over the Easy, Hard and Very hard tiers.
Unofficial. Not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS. This is community study material — every question is
draft; cross-check against the AWS docs and the official practice set.
Every question was written for this pack (source: "original", tag
scenario, ids aws-saa-<tier>-d<domain>-<n>) from the public AWS
documentation and the official exam guide. None is imported or adapted from
a community bank, AWS's official practice questions, or any exam dump. Each
question's sourceRef is the AWS doc page it rests on, and its explanation
ends with the same link. See NOTICE.md.
The questions follow the exam's form: a situation with its constraints ("LEAST operational overhead", "MOST cost-effective"), four full-sentence options with one best answer, or five options for "Select TWO" (23 of the 260). Every wrong option is a real AWS feature misapplied or a near-miss that fails one constraint, carries a one-sentence note saying why it fails, and the question's explanation covers the key and the tempting distractors.
Categories are the official exam domains, with the exam guide's weights
as category weights, so the app's readiness estimate is weighted like the
real exam. Each question is also tagged with the guide's task statement
(task-1.1 … task-4.4).
| Domain | Weight | Questions (Easy / Hard / Very hard) |
|---|---|---|
| Design Secure Architectures | 30% | 65 (25 / 25 / 15) |
| Design Resilient Architectures | 26% | 65 (25 / 25 / 15) |
| Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% | 65 (25 / 25 / 15) |
| Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% | 65 (25 / 25 / 15) |
The manifest's exam block switches on the timed exam: it deals from the
Very hard tier at the real exam's pace (130 minutes for 65 questions,
pro-rated to the 60 Very hard questions available).
concepts.json holds short concept cards for the services Domain 1 keeps
returning to (IAM roles, SCPs, KMS, VPC endpoints, WAF and Shield, …).
Domain 1 questions link one by conceptId, and the app shows it after a
wrong answer. Domain 2 has its own cards (SQS, load balancing, Auto Scaling,
RDS and Aurora availability, DR strategies, Route 53 routing, …), linked the
same way. Domain 3 adds cards for S3, EBS and file storage performance,
instance choice, DynamoDB, database migrations, network topology, Kinesis
and the Glue/Athena/Lake Formation data lake, and reuses the Domain 2 cards
where they fit. Domain 4 adds cards for S3 storage classes, EC2 purchasing
options, cost management tools, data transfer and NAT gateway costs, EBS,
relational database and DynamoDB cost levers, and compute right-sizing, and
reuses earlier cards where they fit.
- Even mix. All four domains are authored out to 65 questions each, covering all of their task statements. The bank is not yet weighted like the blueprint (30/26/24/20); the readiness estimate applies the weights.
- Draft. No human review yet. An automated blind solve (answering without the keys) agreed with all keys of the first 60 questions; two stems it flagged as loose were tightened. A second blind solve agreed with all 50 keys added to Domain 2, a third with all 50 added to Domain 3, and a fourth with all 50 added to Domain 4.
npm run pack:use packs/aws-saa # after copying this dir into the engine's packs/
npm run dev # http://localhost:3000
Or point the engine at this directory directly. To deploy as its own app,
the included .github/workflows/deploy.yml builds it onto the quizmill
engine (static app in aws-saa-app/, named after the manifest id) and
publishes to Cloudflare Pages (project aws-saa) once the repo's
CLOUDFLARE_* secrets are set.