According to Statista, AWS is the largest cloud provider with respect to the market share captured. If you are planning to move to the cloud domain but don’t know where to start, AWS should be the natural choice.
This AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Beginners guide will cover the following topics:
Learn more about How to Become an AWS Solutions Architect through this YouTube video:
First, let us understand who these professionals are and what they are responsible for.
Who is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect?
Technically, any IT professional who can clear the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Exam is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
An AWS Solutions Architect is responsible for the following things in a company:
- Designing highly available and resilient infrastructure on the AWS platform.
- Optimize costs
- Client server architecture
- Capacity planning
- Requirement gathering by collaborating with business stakeholders
- Setup monitoring for deployed infrastructure.
- Implement up-to-date design patterns, which are implemented throughout the industry.
Roles and Responsibilities of an AWS Solution Architect
The core job of an AWS Architect is to help the company host their application on the AWS Cloud platform. The application should be deployed with all the security measures in place and should be done in a cost-effective manner.
The roles and responsibilities of an AWS Solution Architect typically include:
- Solution Design: Designing scalable and cost-effective cloud architectures based on customer requirements.
- Technical Leadership: Providing technical leadership and guidance to development teams, ensuring alignment with AWS architecture.
- Client Interaction: Engaging with clients to understand their business needs and presenting architectural recommendations.
- Implementation Support: Assisting in the implementation of AWS solutions, including infrastructure as code (IaC) to ensure successful deployment.
- Security Best Practices: Ensuring data protection, Identity and Access Management, and compliance with AWS security standards.
- Performance Optimization: Optimizing AWS environments for performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency, and conducting regular operations.
- Cost Management: Advising on cost optimization strategies, monitoring resource usage, and implementing cost-effective solutions aligned with budget constraints.
- Documentation: Creating and maintaining detailed architecture documentation, diagrams, and guidelines.
- Training and Mentoring: Providing training and mentorship to internal teams or clients on AWS best practices, helping build internal capabilities in cloud architecture.
- Troubleshooting: Providing technical support and troubleshooting assistance during the implementation phase.
- Collaboration: Collaborating with cross-functional teams, including developers, operations, and project managers, to ensure cohesive and successful delivery of cloud solutions.
Further, you will come across the steps that need to be followed to get into this profession.
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Step-by-Step Roadmap on how to become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
There are no prerequisites to prepare for the AWS Solutions Architect exam. Therefore, the AWS Solutions Architect Certification is very popular among professionals who are planning to move from the Non-IT domain to the IT domain.
Following are the steps to cracking the AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification:
Step 1: Refer to the AWS exam guide, and prepare only the topics mentioned in the official AWS exam guide. Also, if you are not acquainted with the basics of AWS and the terminologies involved, we would recommend you go through our Free AWS Course.
Step 2: Practice sample AWS questions to understand the type of questions.
Step 3: Do hands-on to understand all practical related scenarios.
Step 4: Register for AWS Exam and choose your preferable slot.
Step 5: Get more than 720 marks out of 1000 marks to pass the exam.
Step 6: Become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
How to Schedule the AWS Exam
Follow the steps to schedule the AWS Solutions Architect examination:
- Go to aws.amazon.com/certification
- Scroll down and under “Select an AWS Certification” select “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate”
- You will be redirected to a new page, click on “Schedule Exam”
- Sign up or sign in using your credentials
- Fill in the details on the subsequent pages.
- You will now be redirected to a welcome page, where you will need to click on Schedule an exam.
- Now, authorize the exam you want to give; in this case, authorize the AWS Solutions Architect exam
- Once authorized, you will have the option to schedule the exam. Click on Schedule.
- Now choose the mode of giving the exam i.e. offline / online.
- Acknowledge and fill in the details according to the on screen instructions.
- You have successfully scheduled your exam!
AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Outline and Career Guide
Your knowledge, capabilities, and skills will be tested across four distinct sectors, wherein each sector contributes a specific percentage to the overall exam. The sectors or categories in which your SAA-C03 certification exam can be distributed, along with their percentage of weightage, are as follows:
- Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures [30 %]
- Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures [26%]
- Domain 3: Design High Performing Architectures [24%]
- Domain 4: Design Cost Optimized Architectures [20%]
Let us discuss them briefly.
Designing Secure Architectures
The questions asked in this section assess your knowledge about cloud security, and tools or services in AWS, which help you to achieve the same. It will test your knowledge on the following topics:
- Access controls and resource management across multiple AWS accounts
- AWS IAM, AWS IAM identity center, AWS SSO
- Availability zones, regions
- AWS security best practices
- AWS shared responsibility model
Designing Resilient Architectures
The following topics will be covered in this section:
- Designing Microservices or loosely coupled architectures
- Designing highly available or fault-tolerant architectures
- Designing scalable and elastic solutions with the help of AWS techniques and tools, such as CloudWatch, Lambda, and Data Pipeline
The topics that are covered in this category of the syllabus are as follows:
- Determine solutions for scalable storage or compute
- Designing elastic compute solutions
- Designing high performing database solutions
- Designing high performing or scalable network architectures
- Designing high performing data engineering solutions
Designing Cost-optimized Architectures
Under this section, you may get questions related to the modules listed below:
Now that you have read the brief version of the syllabus, let us check out the numerous job opportunities:
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AWS Solutions Architect Associate Jobs Available Right Now
According to Indeed, there are 3600+ job openings for AWS Solutions Architect right now in India. In the US, there are 15,000+ job openings, according to Linkedin.
Source – Linkedin Job Posting for United States
Source – Indeed Job Postings for India
Major organizations around the globe, including Amazon, Accenture, IBM, Intel, and more, are hiring AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associates. Following are some of the job profiles that recruiters from these popular organizations are looking for:
Check out the range of salaries earned by these AWS Certified Solutions Architects below.
AWS Solutions Architect Associate Salary
According to Indeed, associates in AWS Solutions Architect salary is on an average of US$125,000 p.a. in the United States. The salary range of these professionals lies between US$117,750 p.a. and US$140,834 p.a.
In India, these professionals earn in the range of ₹798,913 p.a. to ₹1,225,420 p.a., depending on their skills, work experience, organization, etc.