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Unofficial study guide · Amazon Web Services

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional

An unofficial architecture decision guide aligned to the current SAP-C02 domain scope.

Exam code SAP-C02 · Scope SAP-C02 · Reviewed

How to use this guide

SAP-C02 assumes two or more years designing and implementing AWS solutions. The useful unit of study is an architecture decision under constraints, not a catalog of services.

Practice identifying the requirement that dominates: organizational boundary, recovery objective, migration dependency, operational burden, security, performance, or cost.

Official domain map

D1 · 26%

Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity

  • Network connectivity
  • Security controls
  • Reliability and resilience
  • Multi-account environments
  • Cost visibility
D2 · 29%

Design for New Solutions

  • Deployment strategy
  • Business continuity
  • Security controls
  • Reliability
  • Performance
  • Cost optimization
D3 · 25%

Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions

  • Operational excellence
  • Security
  • Performance
  • Reliability
  • Cost optimization
D4 · 20%

Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization

  • Select workloads
  • Choose migration approaches
  • Design target architecture
  • Identify modernization opportunities

Emerging technologies may appear as unscored content. Keep that separate from the scored domain weights and do not distort the core plan around guessed pretest items.

The same AWS service can be correct or wrong depending on recovery objectives, ownership boundaries, change tolerance, throughput, consistency, compliance, and operating model.

Device-local diagnostic

Mark domains that need review

These selections stay in this browser. They are not an exam score and are never sent to Baitaphish.

No domains currently marked.

Diagnostic

Given one architecture, produce a requirement hierarchy, current-state risk list, target decision, migration sequence, rollback path, and cost/operations tradeoff.

  • Requirement extraction
  • Multi-account design
  • Reliability
  • Migration sequencing
  • Operational excellence
  • Cost reasoning

Shared foundations

These subjects are maintained once across the certification library; this guide applies them through its own domain lens.

Secure architecture

Reason about trust boundaries, resilience, data flows, network controls, and security tradeoffs before selecting products.

Identity and access

Explain authentication, authorization, federation, lifecycle controls, and least privilege across organizational and cloud boundaries.

Risk and governance

Translate business context, policy, legal duties, control ownership, and evidence into defensible risk decisions.

Operations and incident response

Connect telemetry, triage, containment, recovery, change, and continuous improvement to measurable outcomes.

Data protection and cryptography

Choose controls for classification, lifecycle, encryption, keys, secrets, privacy, retention, and defensible deletion.

Delivery and assurance

Build testing, software lifecycle, deployment, evaluation, audit, and evidence practices into normal delivery work.

Study sequence and reusable assets

  1. Organizations and connectivity

    Design account, identity, network, DNS, and governance boundaries.

    • Organizational complexity cases: Choose account, connectivity, identity, and governance boundaries.

  2. New solution tradeoffs

    Select resilient, secure, performant, operable, and cost-aware patterns.

    • New solution design drills: Rank conflicting requirements and defend one architecture.

  3. Improve the estate

    Diagnose existing solutions using observability, change safety, scaling, and cost evidence.

    • Continuous improvement review: Use evidence to find the next safe improvement.

  4. Migration and modernization

    Sequence discovery, dependency treatment, data movement, cutover, rollback, and modernization.

    • Migration and modernization tabletop: Plan dependencies, movement, validation, cutover, and rollback.

Common misconceptions

“Professional-level questions are solved by choosing the most capable service.”

The best design satisfies the stated constraints with acceptable operational complexity, migration risk, resilience, security, and cost.

“A multi-Region design is always more reliable.”

It can add data-consistency, failover, testing, quota, cost, and operational failure modes; map it to explicit recovery and availability requirements.

“Migration ends when data is copied.”

Discovery, dependency mapping, validation, cutover, rollback, operations, and modernization determine whether the business transition succeeds.

Seven-day experienced review sprint

Experienced AWS architect with recent design responsibility and seven days for synthesis.

  1. Day 1 — Diagnostic and multi-account, identity, network, DNS, and governance boundaries.
  2. Day 2 — Reliability, recovery objectives, data consistency, decoupling, and failure drills.
  3. Day 3 — Security, encryption, access paths, deployment safety, and compliance constraints.
  4. Day 4 — Performance, scaling, caching, quotas, observability, and operational burden.
  5. Day 5 — Cost attribution, commitment, storage lifecycle, transfer, and architecture tradeoffs.
  6. Day 6 — Migration discovery, data movement, cutover, rollback, and modernization cases.
  7. Day 7 — Timed scenarios; review only repeated constraint and sequencing errors.

Longer study path

Architect building professional-level breadth over eight to twelve weeks.

  1. Baseline the four domains with architecture narratives, not flash-card recall.
  2. Build one reference design each for multi-account foundations, resilient applications, analytics, and hybrid connectivity.
  3. Run weekly failure and migration tabletop exercises with explicit objectives and rollback.
  4. Review existing workloads for measurable improvements in security, reliability, performance, operations, and cost.
  5. Complete timed mixed-domain cases and classify every error by missed requirement, constraint, dependency, or tradeoff.

Exam logistics

  • Confirm current AWS exam delivery, timing, language, identification, pricing, and rescheduling details before booking.
  • Expect long scenarios with distractors; identify the explicit requirement and constraint before evaluating services.
  • This unofficial guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS and contains no recalled exam content.

Official sources