SAP-C02 · AWS
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
The capstone of the AWS architecture track, and a genuine step up from SAA-C03 rather than more of it.
The professional-level architecture exam, and a genuine step up from SAA-C03 rather than more of the same. AWS assumes two or more years of hands-on experience designing and running production workloads on AWS before you sit it. Expect long, multi-constraint scenarios - multi-account governance, migration strategy for an estate that already exists, and trade-offs between cost, performance and resilience where several answers work and only one fits every constraint in the question. Very little of it is single-service recall. The pass mark is 75%, higher than the 72% used by the associate exams. This is the natural capstone of the AWS architecture track, after CLF-C02 establishes the vocabulary and SAA-C03 covers associate-level design. If you currently hold only CLF-C02, this is not the next exam to buy - SAA-C03 is.
Who sits this exam
Architects already responsible for production AWS estates. AWS assumes two or more years of hands-on experience designing and running them, and the questions are long multi-constraint scenarios rather than single-service recall. If you hold only CLF-C02, SAA-C03 comes first.
What it covers
Each domain below is weighted the way the real exam weights it, and scored separately, so you can see which one is holding the total down.
- 01Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
- 02Design for New Solutions
- 03Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions
- 04Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
How you will practise
- Review
- Practice with answers explained immediately.
- Section
- Review one domain at a time.
- Timed
- A timed set with results at the end.
- Final
- The full exam simulation — every question, timed.
What passing proves
That you can hold an organisation-sized problem in view at once: governance across many accounts, a migration strategy for an estate that already exists, and trade-offs between cost, performance and resilience where several answers work and only one fits every constraint.