AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Survival Guide

Window: Global | Advanced AWS architecture | 75 Q / 180 min

Must-do topics

• High availability & DR: Multi-AZ, Multi-Region, RTO/RPO trade-offs
• Storage & databases: S3, EBS, EFS, Glacier, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift
• Networking: VPC design, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, hybrid connectivity
• Security: IAM, KMS, cross-account roles, encryption in transit/rest, SCPs
• Migration/modernization: DMS, Snowball, Serverless (Lambda, Step Functions), Containers (ECS/EKS)
• Cost optimization: Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, storage tiering

Top traps (avoid)

• Picking single-AZ when multi-AZ is standard
• Forgetting cross-region replication for DR
• Confusing S3 consistency vs DynamoDB consistency
• Ignoring service quotas and throttling
• Choosing “build custom” when a managed service exists

Time split

• 75 scenario Qs / 180 min → ~2.5 min/Q
• First pass = confident recalls; second pass = architecture diagrams

Last-48h checklist

• HA/DR strategies table (backup & restore, pilot light, warm standby, multi-site)
• Database migration tool decision sheet
• IAM policies vs permission boundaries vs SCPs
• VPC + hybrid connectivity diagram quick sketch

Quick facts

• S3: strong consistency for all ops (since Dec 2020)
• RDS: Multi-AZ = standby failover; Read Replica = scale reads
• DynamoDB: eventual vs strong consistency; DAX = cache
• Transit Gateway connects VPCs + on-prem in hub/spoke

Speed tactics

• Identify business driver (availability, cost, performance, security) → pick service accordingly
• Eliminate answers requiring custom ops when AWS service exists
• Sketch quick diagram for network-heavy Qs

Day-of mini-plan

• Warm-up: 1 HA/DR Q, 1 IAM Q, 1 networking Q
• Pace 25 Q/hour; flag ~10 tough ones for last 20 min