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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02)

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) certification is designed to validate an individual’s advanced technical expertise and experience in architecting distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. This credential highlights a candidate’s ability to design scalable, cost-optimized, secure, and automated solutions that align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

For organizations, this certification serves as a benchmark to identify professionals capable of managing complex cloud architecture, leading modernization initiatives, and delivering enterprise-level solutions efficiently.

– Exam Purpose and Objectives

This professional-level certification exam is tailored for individuals serving in the role of Solutions Architect, focusing on validating the following capabilities:

  • Designing architectures for large-scale, complex organizational environments.
  • Creating new cloud-native solutions using AWS best practices.
  • Continuously enhancing and optimizing existing AWS architectures.
  • Leading and accelerating migration and modernization efforts of workloads to AWS.

– Ideal Candidate Profile

The recommended candidate for the SAP-C02 exam should meet the following criteria:

  • Experience: A minimum of two years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS.
  • Expertise: Ability to assess business and technical requirements and make architectural decisions that support secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud solutions.
  • Strategic Guidance: Skilled in providing architectural leadership across multiple applications and departments within complex organizational structures.

This individual is expected to apply a deep understanding of AWS services to create comprehensive solutions that meet evolving business needs.

Exam Details

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam falls under the Professional certification category and is designed to assess advanced expertise in architecting complex solutions on AWS. The exam has a duration of 180 minutes and includes 75 questions, presented in either multiple-choice or multiple-response formats.

Candidates have the flexibility to take the exam either at a Pearson VUE testing center or through an online proctored environment, based on their convenience and availability. The exam is offered in multiple languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, and Spanish (Latin America). Scoring for the SAP-C02 exam is based on a scaled score ranging from 100 to 1,000, with a minimum passing score of 750 required to earn the certification.

Course Outline

The exam covers the following topics:

1. Designing Solutions for Organizational Complexity (26%)

1.1 Explain Architecting network connectivity strategies.

Skills Evaluated

  • Understand how to evaluate connectivity options for multiple VPCs
  • Learn about evaluating connectivity options for on-premises, co-location, and cloud integration
  • Learn to select AWS Regions and Availability Zones based on network and latency requirements (AWS Documentation: Regions and Zones)
  • Learn to troubleshoot traffic flows by using AWS tools (AWS Documentation: Logging IP traffic using VPC Flow Logs)
  • Learn about utilizng service endpoints for service integrations (AWS Documentation: AWS service endpoints)

1.2 Prescribing security controls

Skills Evaluated

1.3 Designing reliable and resilient architectures.

  • Recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) (AWS Documentation: Recovery objectives)
  • Disaster recovery strategies (for example, using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery [CloudEndure Disaster Recovery], pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site) (AWS Documentation: Disaster recovery options in the cloud)
  • Data backup and restoration (AWS Documentation: Restoring a backup)

Skills Evaluated

1.4 Designing a multi-account AWS environment.

Skills Evaluated 

  • Learn about evaluating the most appropriate account structure for organizational requirements (AWS Documentation: Organizing Your AWS Environment Using Multiple Accounts)
  • Learn to recommend a strategy for central logging and event notifications
  • Learn about developing a multi-account governance model

1.5 Determining cost optimization and visibility strategies.

  • AWS cost and usage monitoring tools (for example, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Pricing Calculator, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets) (AWS Documentation: Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer)
  • AWS purchasing options (for example, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances) (AWS Documentation: Instance purchasing options)
  • AWS right-sizing visibility tools (for example, AWS Compute Optimizer, Amazon S3 Storage Lens)

Skills Evaluated

2. Designing for New Solutions (29%)

2.1 Explain to design a deployment strategy to meet business requirements

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about determining an application or upgrade path for new services and features (AWS Documentation: Perform an automated upgrade)
  • Learn about selecting services to develop deployment strategies and implement appropriate rollback mechanisms (AWS Documentation: Deployment strategies)
  • Learn to adopt managed services as needed to reduce infrastructure provisioning and patching overhead (AWS Documentation: What is AWS Managed Services?)
  • Making advanced technologies accessible by delegating complex development and deployment tasks to AWS (AWS Documentation: Design principles)

2.2 Designing a solution to ensure business continuity.

Skills Evaluated

2.3 Determining security controls based on requirements.

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn to specify IAM users and IAM roles that adhere to the principle of least privilege access (AWS Documentation: Security best practices in IAM)
  • Learn about specifying inbound and outbound network flows by using security group rules and network ACL rules (AWS Documentation: Control traffic to subnets using network ACLs)
  • Learn to develop attack mitigation strategies for large-scale web applications (AWS Documentation: Mitigation techniques)
  • Learn to develop encryption strategies for data at rest and data in transit (AWS Documentation: Encrypting Data-at-Rest and Data-in-Transit)
  • Understand how specify service endpoints for service integrations
  • Learn about developing strategies for patch management to remain compliant with organizational standards

2.4 Designing a strategy to meet reliability requirements.

  • AWS global infrastructure (AWS Documentation: Global infrastructure)
  • AWS storage services and replication strategies (for example Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache) Multi-AZ and multi-Region architectures (AWS Documentation: Disaster recovery options in the cloud)
  • Auto scaling policies and events (AWS Documentation: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling)
  • Application integration (for example, Amazon Simple Notification Service [Amazon SNS], Amazon Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS], AWS Step Functions) (AWS Documentation: Application integration)
  • Service quotas and limits 

Skills Evaluated

2.5 Designing a solution to meet performance objectives.

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about designing large-scale application architectures for a variety of access patterns
  • Learn to design an elastic architecture based on business objectives (AWS Documentation: Adopting a consistent design decision approach)
  • Learn to apply design patterns to meet performance objectives with caching, buffering, and replicas (AWS Documentation: Performance Design Patterns for Amazon S3)
  • Learn about developing a process methodology for selecting purpose-built services for required tasks
  • Learn to design a right-sizing strategy (AWS Documentation: Tips for Right Sizing)

2.6 Explaining and determining a cost optimization strategy to meet solution goals and objectives.

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about identifying opportunities for selecting and right sizing infrastructure for cost-effective resources (AWS Documentation: Identifying Opportunities to Right Size)
  • Learn to identify appropriate pricing models
  • Understand about performing data transfer modeling and selecting services to reduce data transfer costs (AWS Documentation: Perform data transfer modeling)
  • Learn about developing a strategy and implementing controls for expenditure and usage awareness

3. Understanding to Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions (25%)

3.1 Determining a strategy to improve overall operational excellence

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about determine the most appropriate logging and monitoring strategy (AWS Documentation: Designing and implementing logging and monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch)
  • Understand about evaluating current deployment processes for improvement opportunities
  • Learn about prioritizing opportunities for automation within a solution stack
  • Learn to recommende the appropriate AWS solution to enable configuration management automation (AWS Documentation: AWS Systems Manager Automation)
  • Understand how to engineer failure scenario activities to support and exercise an understanding of recovery actions

3.2 Determining a strategy to improve security.

Skills Evaluated

3.3 Determining a strategy to improve performance.

  • Understand High-performing systems architectures (for example, auto scaling, instance fleets, and placement groups) (AWS Documentation: Placement groups)
  • Global service offerings (for example, AWS Global Accelerator, Amazon CloudFront, and edge computing services)
  • Learn about Monitoring tool sets and services (for example, CloudWatch) (AWS Documentation: What is Amazon CloudWatch?)
  • Service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn to translate business requirements to measurable metrics
  • Learn to test potential remediation solutions and making recommendations (AWS Documentation: GuardDuty EC2 finding types)
  • Learn to propose opportunities for the adoption of new technologies and managed services (AWS Documentation: Design principles)
  • Learn to assess solutions and applying right sizing based on requirements (AWS Documentation: Tips for Right Sizing)
  • Learn about identifying and examining performance bottlenecks

3.4 Determining a strategy to improve reliability

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about understanding application growth and usage trends (AWS Documentation: Amazon EC2 usage reports)
  • Learn to evaluate existing architecture to determine areas that are not sufficiently reliable
  • Learn about remediating single points of failure
  • Learn to enable data replication, self-healing, and elastic features and services (AWS Documentation: What is Elastic Disaster Recovery?)

3.5 Identifying opportunities for cost optimizations.

  • Cost-conscious architecture choices (for example, utilizing Spot Instances, scaling policies, and right-sizing resources) (AWS Documentation: Spot Instances)
  • Understand Price model adoptions (for example, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans) (AWS Documentation: Savings Plans)
  • Networking and data transfer costs (AWS Documentation: Understanding data transfer charges)
  • Cost management, alerting, and reporting

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about analyzing usage reports to identify underutilized and overutilized resources (AWS Documentation: Amazon EC2 usage reports)
  • Learn to utilize AWS solutions to identify unused resources (AWS Documentation: Identify your unused resources)
  • Learn avbout designing billing alarms based on expected usage patterns
  • Learn to investigate AWS Cost and Usage Reports at a granular level (AWS Documentation: What are AWS Cost and Usage Reports?)
  • Learn to utilize tagging for cost allocation and reporting

4. Accelerating Workload Migration and Modernization (20%)

4.1 Selecting existing workloads and processes for potential migration.

Skills Evaluated

4.2 Determining the optimal migration approach for existing workloads.

  • Understand Data migration options and tools (for example, AWS DataSync, AWS Transfer Family, AWS Snow Family, S3 Transfer Acceleration) (AWS Documentation: AWS managed migration tools)
  • Application migration tools (for example, AWS Application Discovery Service, AWS Application Migration Service [CloudEndure Migration], AWS Server Migration Service [AWS SMS]) (AWS Documentation: Migration and transfer)
  • AWS networking services and DNS (for example, Direct Connect, AWS Site-to-Site VPN, Route 53)
  • Learn about Identity services (for example, AWS SSO, AWS Directory Service) (AWS Documentation: Single sign-on)
  • Database migration tools (for example, AWS Database Migration Service [AWS DMS], AWS Schema Conversion Tool [AWS SCT])
  • Understand Governance tools (for example, AWS Control Tower, Organizations) (AWS Documentation: AWS Control Tower and AWS Organizations)

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about selecting the appropriate database transfer mechanism (AWS Documentation: Data Migration Mechanism)
  • Learn to select the appropriate application transfer mechanism
  • Learn to select the appropriate data transfer service and migration strategy (AWS Documentation: About the migration strategies)
  • Learn about implementing the appropriate security methods to migration tools
  • Learn to select the appropriate governance model (AWS Documentation: Management and governance)

4.3 Determining a new architecture for existing workloads.

  • Understand Compute services (for example, Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk) (AWS Documentation: Compute services)
  •  Containers (for example, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS], Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS], AWS Fargate, Amazon Elastic Container Registry [Amazon ECR]) (AWS Documentation: Choosing an AWS container service)
  • Learn about AWS storage services (for example, Amazon Elastic Block Store [Amazon EBS], Amazon Elastic File System [Amazon EFS], Amazon FSx, Amazon S3, Volume Gateway) (AWS Documentation: Storage)
  • Understand Databases (for example, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon OpenSearch Service [Amazon Elasticsearch Service], Amazon RDS, self-managed databases on Amazon EC2) (AWS Documentation: Databases)

Skills Evaluated

4.4 Determining opportunities for modernization and enhancements.

  • Understand Serverless compute offerings (for example, AWS Lambda) (AWS Documentation: What is AWS Lambda?)
  • Containers (for example, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate) (AWS Documentation: Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate)
  • AWS storage services (for example, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS)
  • Learn about Purpose-built databases (for example, DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora Serverless, ElastiCache) (AWS Documentation: Databases)
  • Integration service (for example, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge [Amazon CloudWatch Events], Step Functions)

Skills Evaluated

  • Learn about identifying opportunities to decouple application components (AWS Documentation: Decouple by using a standalone API)
  • Learn to identify opportunities for serverless solutions
  • Learn to select the appropriate service for containers (AWS Documentation: Choosing an AWS container service)
  • Learn about identifying opportunities for purpose-built databases
  • Learn to select the appropriate application integration service (AWS Documentation: Application integration)

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) Exam FAQS

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AWS Certification Exam Policy

Amazon Web Services (AWS) enforces a comprehensive and transparent certification policy framework to ensure the integrity, fairness, and consistency of its examination process. These policies encompass critical components such as exam retake rules, scoring methodology, and eligibility requirements, aligning with industry best practices for professional certifications.

Retake Policy

Candidates who do not pass an AWS certification exam must observe a mandatory waiting period of 14 calendar days before reattempting the exam. While there is no restriction on the number of retakes allowed, each attempt requires payment of the full exam fee.

Once a candidate successfully passes a specific version of an AWS certification exam, they are not permitted to retake the same version for a period of two years. However, if a new version of the exam is released—identified by an updated exam guide and a new series code—the candidate becomes eligible to attempt the revised version.

Exam Results and Scoring

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam results are reported with a pass or fail status, determined using a scaled scoring system. Candidates receive a score ranging from 100 to 1,000, with a minimum passing score of 750. This scaled scoring model is designed to ensure consistency and fairness across different versions of the exam, accounting for slight variations in difficulty.

Scores reflect overall exam performance and are not required to meet a minimum score in each individual section. The exam follows a compensatory scoring model, meaning strong performance in one area can offset weaker performance in another. Score reports may also include section-level feedback, helping candidates identify their strengths and areas for improvement.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Study Guide

Step 1: Understand the Exam Objectives Thoroughly

Begin your preparation by carefully reviewing the SAP-C02 exam guide available on the official AWS Certification website. The guide outlines the key domains and competencies evaluated in the exam, such as designing for organizational complexity, developing new solutions, and optimizing existing ones. Familiarizing yourself with these objectives will help you identify the breadth and depth of knowledge expected and allow you to align your study plan accordingly.

Step 2: Leverage Official AWS Training Resources

AWS provides a wide range of official training resources tailored to the exam. Start with AWS Training and Certification materials specifically designed for solutions architects at the professional level. These resources are curated by AWS experts and provide deep insights into core services, architectural best practices, security, governance, cost optimization, and operational excellence—all essential areas for the exam.

Step 3: Explore AWS Skill Builder for Targeted Learning

Utilize the AWS Skill Builder platform to access self-paced learning modules. Skill Builder offers structured learning paths, video tutorials, interactive content, and knowledge checks that help reinforce your understanding of advanced AWS concepts. This platform is especially helpful if you’re looking to study on your own schedule and track progress over time.

Step 4: Enroll in Digital Courses to Address Knowledge Gaps

After assessing the exam objectives and reviewing initial materials, identify areas where your knowledge may be lacking. Enroll in specialized digital courses that focus on these weaker domains. For instance, if you struggle with designing hybrid architectures or implementing complex security controls, choose courses that offer in-depth training and use case-based examples in those areas.

Step 5: Gain Hands-On Experience with AWS Builder Labs

Practical experience is crucial for success in the SAP-C02 exam. Engage with AWS Builder Labs, which provide guided, hands-on environments to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world scenarios. These labs are scenario-based and help you gain confidence in using the AWS Management Console and CLI for tasks like setting up VPCs, designing multi-tier applications, and implementing security controls.

Step 6: Reinforce Skills with AWS Cloud Quest and AWS Jam

To further develop problem-solving skills in a gamified, interactive environment, take advantage of AWS Cloud Quest and AWS Jam events. AWS Cloud Quest allows you to complete real-world cloud missions in a virtual city, while AWS Jam provides team-based challenges that mimic actual job scenarios. These experiences are ideal for reinforcing architectural decision-making under pressure.

Step 7: Join AWS Study Groups and Communities

Collaborating with others can significantly enhance your learning experience. Join AWS study groups, online forums, or professional communities such as Reddit, LinkedIn groups, Discord servers, or local meetup groups. These communities offer a platform to discuss complex topics, clarify doubts, exchange resources, and stay motivated throughout your preparation journey.

Step 8: Take Full-Length Practice Exams

As your exam date approaches, simulate the test environment by taking full-length SAP-C02 practice exams. These practice tests help evaluate your readiness, identify weak areas, and improve your time management skills. Choose high-quality, up-to-date mock exams that reflect the current format and difficulty level of the actual certification.

Step 9: Analyze and Review Practice Test Results

After completing practice exams, invest time in thoroughly reviewing the results. Focus on understanding why certain answers were correct or incorrect, and revisit the associated AWS documentation or training material if needed. This review process helps solidify concepts and ensures you don’t repeat mistakes in the actual exam.

Step 10: Maintain a Consistent Study Schedule

Consistency is key to mastering the extensive material covered in the SAP-C02 exam. Set a realistic study plan with daily or weekly goals, allocate dedicated time for both theoretical learning and hands-on labs, and track your progress regularly. Avoid last-minute cramming and aim for steady, focused learning over time.

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