AWS Certified Solution Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Solution Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Learning Path
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP-C01) exam is the upgraded pattern of the previous Solution Architect - Professional exam which was released last year (2018) and upgraded this year.
AWS Certified Solution Architect - Professional (SAP-C01) exam basically validates
- Design and deploy denamically scalable, highly available, fault-tolerant,
and reliable application on AWS
- Select appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based
on given requirements
- Migrate complex, multi-tier applications on AWS
- Design and deploy enterprise-wide scalable operations AWS
- Implement cost-control strategies
Refer to AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Exam Guide

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Summary
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) exam was for a total of 170 minutes but it had 75 questions. The questions and answers options are quite long and there is a lot of reading that needs to be done, so be sure you are prepared and manage your time well. As always, mark the questions for review and move on and come back to them after you are done with all.
- One of the key tactic I followed when solving any question was to read the question and use paper and pencil to draw a rough architecture and focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach to the right answer or atleast have a 50% chance of getting it right.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) focuses a lot on concepts and services related to Scalability, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Migration, Security and Cost Control.
Be sure to cover the following topics:
Whitepapers are the key to understand
- Overview of Security Processes
- Disaster Recovery (Hint:
make sure you understand the difference between each types esp. pilot light, warm standby w.r.t RTO and RPO) - Cloud migration (Hint:
make sure you understand the difference between rehost, replatform, rearchitect) - Architecting for the Cloud: Best Practices
- Building Fault-Tolerant Application on AWS
Migration & Transfer
- Understand Cloud Migration Services
- Know Server Migration Service
- Know Database Migration Service (Hint:
Elasticsearch is supported by DMS) - Know Snowball vs Snowball Edge vs SnowMobile
- Know AWS Application Discovery Service (Hint:
agentless mode does not track processes)
Management & Governance tools
- Understand AWS Organizations
- Know the difference between Service Control Policies and IAM Policies (Hint:
SCP is the maximum permission that an user can have, however the user needs to be explicitly given IAM policy)
- Know the difference between Service Control Policies and IAM Policies (Hint:
- Systems Manager
- Understand AWS Systems Manager and its various services like parameter store, patch manager
- Understand the Systems Manager Patch Manager patching process
- Understand Cloudwatch
- Understand Cloudwatch logs
- Understand CloudWatch Subscription Filters and its integration with other services.
- Understand CloudWatch Events
- Understand CloudTrail for audit and governance
- Know CloudFormation esp. in terms of Disaster recovery to replicate environment across regions.
- Exam does not cover developer tools like CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild
Networking & Content Delivery
- Know VPC
- Understand Security Groups, NACLs (Hint:
know NACLs are stateless) - Understand VPC Endpoints (Hint:
know how to restrict access on S3 to specific VPC Endpoint) - Understand VPC Flow Logs
- Understand VPC Peering
- Understand Security Groups, NACLs (Hint:
- Route 53
- Understand Route 53
- Understand Routing Policies and their use cases Focus on Weighted, Latency routing poicies
- Understand CloudFront and use cases (Hint:
S3 caching) - Understand API Gateway
- Know AWS PrivateLink (Hint:
can be used to exposed microservices within the AWS network) - Load Balancer
- Understand ELB, ALB and NLB
- Understand ELB with Auto Scaling
Security, Identity & Compliance
- AWS Identity and Access Management
- Understand IAM Roles and user cases
- Understand IAM Web Identity & Federation
- Know IAM Best Practices
- Know AWS Shield, WAF for DDoS Protection
Storage
- Exam does not cover Storage services in deep
- Focus on Simple Secure Service (S3) (Hint:
Know S3 supports retrieval of partial content using Range Get requests)- Understand S3 Permissions (Hint:
know S3 bucket policy to control access to VPC Endpoints) - Understand S3 Data Protection
- Understand S3 Storage Classes (Hint:
Glacier for archival) - Understand S3 Subresources (Hint:
Requester Pays can allow you to host content, while the user of the content pays the transfer costs) - Know S3 disaster recovery across region. (Hint:
cross region replocation) - Know CloudFront for caching to improve performance
- Understand S3 Permissions (Hint:
- Elastic Block Store
- Focus mainly on EBS Backup using snapshots for HA and Disaster recovery
- Understand Storage Gateway
Database
- Exam covers databases mainly in terms of Scalability, High Availability and Disaster Recovery.
- Understand RDS Multi-AZ vs Read Replicas (hint: cross region replication and availability of data)
- Know Aurora DR & HA using Read Replicas and Global Database
- Know DynamoDB
- Know DynamoDB Streams for tracking changes
- DynamoDB Auto Scaling & DAX for caching (hint: know TTL which can expire the data)
- Improve performance – Best practices (hint : one question for selection of keys)
Compute
- Understand EC2
- Understand EC2 Instance Types
- Understand EC2 Instance Purchase Types
- Understand Auto Scaling
- Know Elastic Beanstalk mainly from the perspective of migration.
- Understand Lambda (hint: know what it takes to run Lambda within an VPC and Lambda@Edge)
- Exam did not cover anything of relevance relating to ECS and EKS
Analytics
- Understand Kinesis
- Understand the difference between Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Firehose
- Know Amazon Elasticsearch provides a managed solution
Integration Tools
- Understand SQS in terms of loose coupling and scaling.
- Know the difference between SQS Standard and FIFO
- Know how CloudWatch integration with SNS and Lambda can help in notification
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Resources
- Online Courses
- DolfinEd AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional 2019 course [Recommended]
- Practice tests
- Braincert AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Practice Exams [Recommended] – This can help you a lot to practice and deep dive.