AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP-C03) Study Plan¶

8-Week Schedule¶

Plan about 8-10 hours a week. Professional questions are long, so after each week read the corresponding exam guide domain page and make sure you can justify every service choice by the constraint that drives it.

Weeks 1-2: Domain 1 (25%)¶

Messaging guarantees, event buses, Step Functions, containers, VPC Lattice, scaling, ingress, multi-tenancy
AI/ML integration: Bedrock, agents, SageMaker AI inference, RAG ingestion and retrieval
Hybrid connectivity, DNS, data sync, hybrid compute
Network design, inspection, IPv6, global routing
Data lakes, analytics, database and storage selection, caching, sharing
Note: 01-architecture-design-built-for-the-cloud.md

Weeks 3-4: Domain 2 (25%)¶

Federation, cross-account access, least-privilege tools, data perimeter, workload identity
Encryption, CloudHSM, post-quantum concepts
Organizations, Control Tower, SCPs and RCPs, central logging, compliance monitoring
Residency, evidence, threat modeling, responsible AI controls
Note: 02-security-compliance-governance.md

Week 5: Domain 3 (15%)¶

Purchase options, rightsizing, Step Functions types, AI cost
Data transfer costs, endpoints, replication
Tagging, reporting, chargeback, budgets, anomaly detection
Storage and database cost levers
Note: 03-cost-optimized-architecture-design.md

Week 6: Domain 4 (15%)¶

Migration strategies, DMS, strangler fig
DR strategies and RTO/RPO, multi-Region failover
Backup governance, immutability, chaos engineering
Note: 04-resilience-migration-business-continuity.md

Week 7: Domain 5 (20%)¶

CloudFormation and CDK, policy as code, StackSets
Pipelines, scanning, cross-account promotion
Observability, SLOs, controlled remediation, runbooks
Note: 05-operational-excellence-automation.md

Week 8: Review¶

Practice questions and scenarios; return to the note for each miss
Re-read "What changed from SAP-C02" in the README
Re-read the exam guide's service additions and removals so you study only in-scope services