AWS SAA Cheat Sheet: 5 Things I Wish I Knew Before the Exam

Nagesh Raj 👨🏻‍💻

Follow

2 min read

·

Apr 22, 2025

205

6

Listen

Share

I scored 825/1000 on the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam — but only after making every mistake in the book. Here’s what I wish I knew before wasting 40+ hours on useless study tactics.

📌 1. The Exam is Scenario-Based (Not Fact Recall)

What I Thought: “I need to memorize every AWS service and its limits.”
Reality: 80% of questions are real-world scenarios like:

”Your company needs a multi-region database with the lowest latency. Which service combo should you use?”

Tip: Focus on use cases for:
✅ S3 (storage tiers, lifecycle policies)
✅ EC2 (instance types, spot vs. reserved)
✅ RDS vs. DynamoDB (when to use each, key differences)

📌 2. Skip These Low-Yield Topics

Wasted time on AWS Snowball, OpsWorks, and Mechanical Turk — zero questions on them.

Priority Topics:
🔴 High: VPC, IAM, S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, EFS, FSx (Underrated!)
🟡 Medium: CloudFront, SQS/SNS, KMS, DirectConnect
⚫ Low: AWS Organizations, WorkSpaces

📌 3. The “Rule of 5” for VPCs

VPC questions are 20%+ of the exam. Master:

1. Subnets (public vs. private)