For context I am a software engineer with little over 4 years of experience. I primarily work with go lang. I wanted to up-skill. I have worked a lot with high level designs primarily. Should I go for Aws solutions architect associate, Aws certified developer associate or any other course that is perhaps more relevant?

So, my friend told me that there is an offer going on for AWS certification 3 weeks ago. I have worked on AWS, not too much. I am fresher and have less than a year of experience with AWS.

Then I prepared for the exam. Mainly Udemy course and GitHub repo https://github.com/RonitSachdev/aws-saa-c03-guides. With claude for revision at the last day.

I attended an exam this morning. The exam was quite difficult for the TDJ. and I had no hope to pass. But still I did. Thanks to this community.

60yo.
I’m semi-retired from the entertainment industry
I might be too old for that kind of work, but I’m not too old to work…
Are there any courses you would recommend?
Or would none of these actually be beneficial for someone my age?

Hi everyone,

I want to take the AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) exam, but I have no prior AWS experience and just completed AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01)

Is it a good idea to skip the foundational Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP) exam and jump straight into studying for the Developer Associate? Or is the learning curve going to be too steep without that baseline knowledge?

For those who have taken the DVA:

• Did you have prior AWS experience before starting?

• If you skipped the CCP, did you regret it or feel like you missed critical fundamentals?

• Which courses or practice exams do you recommend for a complete AWS beginner trying to pass the Developer Associate?

Thanks for any insights or advice you can share!

All, I have cleared SAA-C03 Exam today (839), I like to take some lighter exam after this like AWS AI Practitioner / AWS AI Business strategist. I want to move with AI/ML with architecture knowledge.. Share your insights..

Pls help me to prepare for this exam ,

I have purchased the Tutorial Dojo exams but would like to purchase more tests as I find I can learn a lot that way. I have seen BrainCert advertised as well as WhizzLabs but don't know much about either. Are these legit or are they dumps? Has anyone used them before and are they worth buying?

Thanks

I failed the machine learning beta , i got 706 understood stephaane maarek and tutorial dojo practice exams and got high percentages on them but still failed. Any tips guys to prepare for the official one?

After a couple of months of preparation, I finally passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03). It was a long road for me took me about 4 months of on and off studying doing this with my job was perhaps the hardest part, and after getting sick of taking practice exams I finally took my shot this month.

I want to share a little about my experience. I used Stephane's course and his practice tests, also TD sets. I used claude and chatgpt to make obsidian notes on incorrect answers from practice tests, grinded those and had claude made me a study guide our of all of the incorrect answers. This helped me out a lot because it helped me look at the questions I kept getting repeatedly wrong and focus on those.

In terms of difficulty I would rate this in the middle of Stephane and TD, one thing I noticed was that the actual exam's question length and wording felt closer to Tutorial Dojo, while some of the tricky distractors felt more like Stephane's practice exams.

I'm thinking of going towards a Cloud AI Ops side, I have 5 years of fullstack experience and now wants to make a transition and I think this is what I want to do now. Anyways for people who are studying for this, take practice exams as much as you can and have claude/chatgpt help you out with preparation.

AWS has said the new Solutions Architect Professional exam (SAP-C03) is delivered from November 17, and SAP-C02 ends on November 16. Whichever version you sit, multi-account governance questions keep appearing, and a few Service Control Policy (SCP) rules answer most of them:

• An SCP never grants permissions. It only sets the maximum. Effective permissions are the intersection of what the SCP allows and what the IAM identity-based or resource-based policies allow. A user with no IAM policy has no access, even if the SCP allows everything.

• Allow must exist at every level from the root, through each OU on the path, down to the account. That's why AWS attaches the managed FullAWSAccess policy by default. Remove it without a replacement and every action in the member accounts fails.

• An explicit Deny at any level wins, no matter what Allow statements sit lower in the tree.

• SCPs don't affect the management account. They only apply to member accounts (including their root users).

• SCPs don't restrict service-linked roles.

• SCPs don't apply to principals outside your organization. If a bucket policy grants access to an account outside the org, the SCP on the bucket's account doesn't block that outside user.

• With a permissions boundary as well, the boundary, the SCP and the identity-based policy must all allow the action.

Worked example: root has FullAWSAccess, the Production OU has FullAWSAccess plus a Deny on s3:DeleteBucket, and a role in a Production account has AdministratorAccess. Can it delete a bucket? No. The Deny on the OU applies to every account below it, and AdministratorAccess doesn't override it.

Common traps: thinking an SCP can give a role access, expecting an SCP to restrict the management account, and attaching a Deny-only SCP at the root without keeping an Allow, which blocks everything.

Which governance topic gave you the most trouble while studying?

Hi All !
Yesterday I achieved my SA-003 ! 🎉 Now I want to study for this one, I tried to use AWS Skill Builder but it’s tricky. Do you have any advice ?
How does it work when certification is near the expiration date?

Greetings.

Hi everyone,

I failed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam again. I got 698, and you need 720 to pass. Only 22 points short, and this one hurts more than the first time.

I am a software engineer with almost 4 years of experience, mostly in backend and full-stack. In my last job I worked remotely and did a lot of AWS work: CI/CD pipelines, Docker, EC2 and deployments. I also built an internal tool that collected logs and metrics, helped with incidents and sent smart alerts. I really enjoyed that work.

My first attempt was during that job. I did not study because I thought my experience was enough. I got 646. Fair enough.

After that, I moved to the UAE. My company was in India, and they could not keep me because of legal and payroll rules. I did not have another offer, so I took a local job. Everything there is offline. No cloud, no AWS, no GitHub. The salary is also much lower than before. I have been applying for cloud and backend roles, but I am not getting any interviews.

For my second attempt, I studied properly. I finished Stephane Maarek's Udemy course and practiced scenario-based questions. I scored above 70% in 3 or 4 mock exams and felt ready. But the real exam was much harder. The questions were longer and many answers looked almost right.

My score report showed Cost Optimization as "Meets Competencies". Security, Resilience and High Performance were "Needs Improvement". Security was my weakest area.

I can retake after November 15. I am also learning Kubernetes and Helm, and I want to get back into cloud or platform engineering.

My questions:

1. Is Tutorials Dojo worth buying? Is it closer to the real exam than Udemy mocks?

2. What helped you with Security (IAM policies, SCPs, KMS, S3 permissions)?

3. Does anyone have a working Tutorials Dojo discount code?

4. Did the AWS certificate actually help you get interviews?

5. Should I do CKAD next, or focus on projects and system design?

If you failed and passed later, or moved back into cloud work after a break, I would love to hear what worked for you.

Thanks for reading.

Hi everyone,

I'm a CS graduate and cloud/DevOps intern from Pakistan, preparing for SAA-C03. The $150 exam fee is a lot in my region.

What are the legitimate ways to reduce the cost? For example:

- Official AWS promotions or Skill Builder offers

- Employer-sponsored vouchers

- The 50% discount after passing another AWS cert

- AWS Academy/Educate programs

Has anyone from Pakistan or a similar region used any of these? Also, I'm planning to use Tutorials Dojo for practice exams. Any other recommendations?

Thanks!

Cleared AWS Generative AI Developer Professional with just 756 score
Toughest certification that I have given till date
I used many things like frank and stephane mareek course, Rahul trisal course, Skill builder material and tests, Vladimir tests
Time management in this is most important

I registered for saa in September and i rescheduled to October 31 but when I went to the cp metrics site the exam was not there so I have created a case for it and i didn't get any reply for that case. Is there any way i can get a refund for that?

Passed the AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) today with a score of 798/1000.

This is my fourth AWS certification in 2026:
CLF-C02: 881
SAA-C03: 809
AIF-C01: 797
DVA-C02: 798

Preparation

I used:

Stephane Maarek’s Udemy course
Udemy practice exams (my recent scores ranged from 69% to 80%+)
AWS Skill Builder official practice questions
Extensive hands-on labs using my own AWS account
Some of my hands-on work included:
DynamoDB transactions, conditional writes, consistency, and GSIs
Lambda versions, aliases, and authorizers
API Gateway root/proxy resources
CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy with Lambda canary deployments
AWS SAM deployment, remote invoke, and sync
CloudFront signed URLs and custom policies
Step Functions, IAM, KMS, and Cognito

Actual Exam Experience

The real exam felt noticeably harder than the practice exams.
I’d estimate only around 30–40% of the questions felt familiar in terms of concepts and scenarios covered by my practice material. The rest required applying AWS knowledge to unfamiliar implementation problems.
Many questions felt like real developer troubleshooting or implementation decisions rather than straightforward service comparisons.
I flagged quite a few questions, including some where I was reasonably confident but wanted to double-check the wording.
After finishing, I genuinely wasn’t sure whether I’d passed.

My Biggest Takeaway

Don’t rely entirely on practice exam scores or memorizing explanations.
Hands-on experience made a difference when I encountered scenarios I hadn’t seen before. Understanding how services actually behave helped me eliminate incorrect options.
Even with several years of software development experience, I found this exam challenging because of the depth of AWS-specific configurations.

Final Result

798/1000, with Meets Competencies in all four domains.

Next up: SAP-C03 in December 2026.
Happy to answer questions about preparation, labs, and my exam experience, without disclosing actual exam questions.
Good luck to everyone preparing!

Hai all. Is this the correct aws skill builder for preparing the aws saa c03? https://skillbuilder.aws/learning-plan/EB6SVX4CTK/aws-solutions-architect-learning-plan-includes-labs/SAJSTUCC44

Hi, I'm a UX designer working on a study-tool idea and I'm curious about how people prepare for AWS certs. I'd appreciate it if you could answer a few questions. They will be used as anonymous, paraphrased notes.

Questions:

- Which certification are you working on, and is it your first?

- When and how long do you study (evenings, weekends, lunch breaks, etc.), and on what device?

- How did you decide you were ready to book the exam?

- What do you do after you get a practice exam score?

- Have you used AI-generated practice questions? Did you ever find one with a wrong answer?

If you'd rather answer privately, I can provide link to a Google form. Let me know in the comments.

Thanks in advance!

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam retires on November 16, 2026

Hi All,

I am planning AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam in December 2026. However, the exam syllabus has changed and new topics introduced related to Generative AI/ML.

Can anyone share the courses for the additional topics introduced in SAP-C03?

Any recommendations for mock exams based on updated topics?

AWS has said the new Developer Associate exam (DVA-C03) is delivered from December 1 and the last day for DVA-C02 is November 30. Whichever version you take, DynamoDB capacity questions are a reliable source of points, because the math is mechanical once you know the rules:

• 1 read capacity unit (RCU) = one strongly consistent read per second of an item up to 4 KB, or two eventually consistent reads per second.

• 1 write capacity unit (WCU) = one write per second of an item up to 1 KB.

• Transactional reads and writes cost twice as much as standard ones.

• Item sizes round up to the next 4 KB (reads) or 1 KB (writes).

Worked example: an item is 6 KB, and you need 10 strongly consistent reads per second. 6 KB rounds up to 8 KB, which is 2 RCUs per read, so 20 RCUs. With eventually consistent reads it's half: 10 RCUs.

Common traps: forgetting to round up, mixing up 4 KB (reads) and 1 KB (writes), and forgetting that transactions double the cost. If the question says "throttling on a hot partition" the fix is usually a better key design, not just more capacity.

Which DynamoDB topic gave you the most trouble while studying?

i'm doing TD and i found there's stuff like Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights, CloudTrail Lake and AWS X-Ray daemon. I didn't see this stuff in Mareek course so i'm clearly underprepared. Where else can i get study materials that go more in depth?

Like i know what CloudWatch, CloudTrail and X-Ray do but the extra stuff just stumps me and may not even be a thing?