AWS Solutions Architect Professional
Amazon Web Services
Complete guide to passing the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam on your first attempt.
$300
~30%
3 years
Global
Amazon Web Services
$140k-$200k
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Complete Overview
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, exam code SAP-C02, is a 180-minute, 75-question exam costing 300 USD for architects who design and evaluate AWS solutions across multiple applications, accounts and business units. AWS recommends two or more years of experience using AWS services to design and implement cloud solutions before attempting it, and expects candidates to be able to give expert guidance on architectural design spanning a complex organization.
Of the 75 questions, 65 are scored and 10 are unscored pretest items that AWS uses to trial future content. The unscored items are not identified. Results come back as a scaled score from 100 to 1,000, and the minimum passing score is 750, which is 30 points higher than the AWS associate exams require. Scoring is compensatory, so a weak domain can be carried by strong ones, but the higher bar leaves less room to write off an entire topic.
The blueprint has four domains: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity at 26 percent, Design for New Solutions at 29 percent, Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions at 25 percent, and Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization at 20 percent. All four sit inside the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and the exam guide frames every task as a design or evaluation decision rather than an implementation step.
Question types are multiple choice, with one correct answer and three distractors, and multiple response, with two or more correct answers from five or more options. On multiple response questions you must select every correct answer to receive credit for the question, with no partial marks. Unanswered questions score as incorrect and there is no penalty for guessing.
What makes SAP-C02 harder than its length suggests is question construction. Stems run several paragraphs, often listing an existing environment, a compliance constraint, an RTO or RPO, a cost ceiling and a migration deadline at once. Two or three of the four options are technically workable, and the correct one is the option that satisfies every stated constraint at the lowest operational overhead. At 180 minutes for 75 questions you get about 2 minutes 24 seconds per question including reading time, which is the real pressure point.
Pearson VUE delivers the exam at a test center or through online proctoring, in English, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese and Spanish (Latin America). The exam uses short names for some AWS services, with the full mapping available through the Help button. AWS also includes unscored pretest questions on emerging topics, currently security and responsible AI controls such as Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, access control for agentic AI applications through AgentCore Identity, and human approval workflows built with AWS Step Functions.
The certification is valid for three years and is recertified by passing the current version of this exam. No other AWS certification recertifies it automatically. AWS cites Skillsoft's IT Skills and Salary Report placing this credential on the list of 15 top-paying certifications for 2023 to 2024 and among the ten most pursued certifications.
Why Get AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certified?
It is one of two AWS professional-level exams, priced at 300 USD, and the only AWS certification that tests design across an entire organization rather than a single workload.
The 750 passing score, 30 points above associate level, is set for an exam whose questions routinely stack four constraints into one scenario, which is why holders can point to it as evidence of decision-making rather than recall.
AWS cites Skillsoft's IT Skills and Salary Report listing this credential among the 15 top-paying certifications of 2023 to 2024 and among the ten most pursued certifications.
Domain 4, worth 20 percent, is entirely about migration and modernization, including the seven common migration strategies and total cost of ownership analysis, which is the work most enterprise cloud programmes are actually funded to do.
Passing grants a 50 percent discount voucher on your next AWS exam, which halves the cost of a specialty exam from 300 USD to 150 USD.
The multi-account content, covering AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, service control policies, centralized logging and cross-account resource sharing, maps directly to platform and landing zone roles that sit above single-team engineering.
Because 10 of the 75 questions are unscored pretest items, only 65 questions decide the outcome, so a handful of unfamiliar emerging-topic questions cannot fail you.
Exam Format & Structure
Duration
180 minutes
Questions
75 questions, of which 65 are scored and 10 are unscored pretest items
Passing Score
750 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000, using a compensatory model so no individual domain has to be passed
Question Types
- Multiple choice: one correct response and three incorrect responses
- Multiple response: two or more correct responses out of five or more options, and you must select all correct responses to receive credit
- Unscored pretest questions mixed in and not identified
- Unscored pretest questions on emerging topics, currently security and responsible AI controls
Delivery Method
Pearson VUE test center or Pearson VUE online proctored exam (OnVUE)
Exam Domains & Topics
Covers architecture that spans multiple accounts, networks and teams: connectivity strategy, security controls, resilience, multi-account structure and cost visibility. This is the domain where a technically correct answer can still be wrong because it ignores the governance model, the account boundary or the tagging strategy the scenario describes.
Key Topics to Master:
- Connectivity for multiple VPCs, and for on-premises, co-location and cloud integration using Direct Connect, AWS VPN and transitive routing
- Hybrid DNS with Amazon Route 53 Resolver and on-premises DNS integration
- Cross-account access management and third-party identity provider federation with IAM and IAM Identity Center
- Encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit with AWS KMS and AWS Certificate Manager
- Centralized security event notification and auditing with CloudTrail, IAM Access Analyzer, Security Hub and Amazon Inspector
- Disaster recovery design against RTO and RPO using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, pilot light, warm standby and multi-site
- Multi-account structure with AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower, plus resource sharing across environments
- Cost visibility with AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, Trusted Advisor and the AWS Pricing Calculator
- Purchasing options and a tagging strategy that maps costs to business units
The largest domain. It covers greenfield design across six tasks: deployment strategy, business continuity, security controls, reliability, performance and cost optimization. Questions here give you requirements with no existing environment, so the decision hinges on matching service capabilities to stated objectives and on minimizing operational overhead.
Key Topics to Master:
- Deployment strategy with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, change management and AWS Systems Manager, including rollback mechanisms
- Adopting managed services to reduce provisioning and patching overhead
- Business continuity design including data and database replication and disaster recovery testing
- Automated, cost-effective backup across multiple Availability Zones or Regions
- Least privilege IAM design, security group and network ACL flows, and service endpoints for service integrations
- Attack mitigation for large-scale web applications with AWS Shield, AWS WAF, Amazon GuardDuty and Security Hub
- Multi-AZ and multi-Region architectures, Auto Scaling policies, loosely coupled dependencies with SNS, SQS and Step Functions
- Route 53 routing policies including latency-based, geolocation and simple routing
- Instance families, purpose-built databases, caching and buffering patterns, and rightsizing strategy
- Pricing models, storage tiering and data transfer cost modelling
Covers improving an environment that already exists across five axes: operational excellence, security, performance, reliability and cost. The distinguishing skill is triage. Scenarios describe a running system with a specific complaint, and you have to choose the change that fixes the stated problem without rebuilding what already works.
Key Topics to Master:
- Logging and monitoring strategy, alerting and automatic remediation, and prioritizing automation opportunities
- Evaluating deployment processes and configuration management automation with AWS Systems Manager
- Failure scenario exercises to validate recovery actions
- Secrets management with Systems Manager and AWS Secrets Manager, and auditing an environment for least privilege
- Automated monitoring and remediation with AWS Config rules, plus patch and update process design
- High-performing architectures with Auto Scaling, instance fleets and placement groups
- Global delivery with AWS Global Accelerator, Amazon CloudFront and edge computing services
- Translating business requirements into measurable metrics, SLAs and KPIs, and identifying performance bottlenecks
- Remediating single points of failure, data replication methods, and service quotas and limits
- Cost analysis using AWS Cost and Usage Reports, billing alarms, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
The smallest domain but the one candidates most often underprepare. It covers selecting workloads for migration, choosing the migration approach, designing a target architecture and finding modernization opportunities. The seven common migration strategies and total cost of ownership analysis are named explicitly in the exam guide.
Key Topics to Master:
- Portfolio assessment, asset planning and wave planning with AWS Migration Hub
- Evaluating applications against the seven common migration strategies, the 7Rs
- Total cost of ownership evaluation
- Data migration with AWS DataSync, AWS Transfer Family, AWS Snow Family and S3 Transfer Acceleration
- Application migration with AWS Application Discovery Service and AWS Application Migration Service
- Database migration with AWS DMS and AWS Schema Conversion Tool
- Target platform selection across EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, EKS, Fargate and ECR
- Storage and database platform selection across EBS, EFS, FSx, S3, Storage Gateway, RDS, DynamoDB and OpenSearch Service
- Modernization through serverless, decoupling with SQS, SNS, EventBridge and Step Functions, and purpose-built databases such as Aurora Serverless and ElastiCache
Recommended Study Plan
- 1Read the SAP-C02 exam guide on docs.aws.amazon.com, including every knowledge and skill statement in all four domains
- 2Take the free AWS Certification Official Practice Question Set for Solutions Architect - Professional to calibrate question length
- 3Enrol in the AWS Skill Builder Exam Prep Plan for AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
- 4Score yourself against each of the 20 task statements and mark any you have never done in production
- 5Build a study tracker weighted 26, 29, 25 and 20 to match the domains
- 1Set up AWS Organizations with two member accounts and apply a service control policy that denies a Region
- 2Deploy an AWS Control Tower landing zone or read its architecture documentation end to end
- 3Configure IAM Identity Center with permission sets across accounts and test cross-account role assumption
- 4Centralize CloudTrail and Config into a logging account and set up a Security Hub delegated administrator
- 5Write down how an SCP interacts with an identity-based policy and a resource-based policy
- 1Build a transit gateway connecting three VPCs with route table segmentation and test the isolation
- 2Compare VPC peering, transit gateway and AWS PrivateLink on transitivity, scale limits and cost
- 3Read the AWS Direct Connect documentation on private, public and transit virtual interfaces and on Direct Connect gateway
- 4Configure Route 53 Resolver inbound and outbound endpoints for hybrid DNS resolution
- 5Model data transfer costs for the same traffic pattern over NAT gateway, VPC endpoint and Direct Connect
- 1Write the four disaster recovery patterns on one page with their typical RTO, RPO, cost and failback complexity
- 2Configure Aurora Global Database or cross-Region read replicas and time a promotion
- 3Configure S3 Cross-Region Replication with replication time control and check the metrics
- 4Read the AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery documentation and note when it beats a rebuild
- 5Run a failure injection exercise on one workload and document the recovery actions that actually worked
- 1Design a KMS key strategy across accounts using key policies and grants, and test cross-account decrypt
- 2Compare AWS WAF managed rule groups, AWS Shield Advanced and CloudFront origin protection for a public web tier
- 3Build a least privilege review workflow using IAM Access Analyzer findings and unused access analysis
- 4Set up AWS Config rules with automatic remediation through Systems Manager Automation
- 5Design a secrets rotation approach with Secrets Manager for a database and compare it to Parameter Store
- 1Work a Cost and Usage Report in Athena and answer three real questions about a bill
- 2Compare Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and Spot for the same steady and bursty workloads
- 3Use AWS Compute Optimizer and S3 Storage Lens to produce a rightsizing recommendation list
- 4Design a tag policy that maps spend to business units and set AWS Budgets alerts per unit
- 5Calculate the data transfer cost of a cross-Region replication design with the AWS Pricing Calculator
- 1Memorise the 7Rs and write one real workload example for each strategy
- 2Run AWS Application Migration Service against a test server and complete a cutover
- 3Run AWS DMS with the Schema Conversion Tool for a heterogeneous migration and read the assessment report
- 4Compare AWS DataSync, AWS Transfer Family, Snowball and S3 Transfer Acceleration on volume, bandwidth and timeline
- 5Take one monolith on EC2 and write the decomposition plan to ECS, Fargate and Lambda with the tradeoffs
- 1Take three existing architectures and produce a prioritized improvement list for operations, security, performance, reliability and cost
- 2Design a blue/green and a canary release for the same service and state the rollback trigger for each
- 3Set up CloudWatch alarms that invoke Systems Manager Automation for a self-healing pattern
- 4Identify single points of failure in a diagram and remediate each one on paper
- 5Practise translating a vague business requirement into a measurable SLA and a monitored KPI
- 1Sit the AWS Certification Official Practice Exam for Solutions Architect - Professional in one 180-minute block
- 2Sit a Tutorials Dojo or Stephane Maarek SAP-C02 practice exam and log misses by domain and by cause
- 3Separate misses into knowledge gaps and reading errors, since reading errors need a pacing fix rather than more study
- 4Practise eliminating options by constraint: cost ceiling first, then RTO or RPO, then operational overhead
- 5Rework the longest scenarios by underlining every constraint before looking at the options
- 1Sit a second full-length timed exam and compare domain scores against week 9
- 2Spend the bulk of the week on your lowest domain, working from AWS documentation rather than practice explanations
- 3Re-read the Domain 4 task statements, which candidates most often underprepare
- 4Review AWS Well-Architected Framework pillar documentation for the two pillars you scored worst on
- 5Confirm you can name the default service quota and the raise path for the limits that appear in your practice misses
- 1Build a one-page decision table for compute, storage, database, network connectivity and migration service selection
- 2Rebuild the multi-account, transit gateway and disaster recovery designs from memory with no documentation
- 3Skim the AWS service short-name list so the Help button is a backup rather than a necessity
- 4Take a third timed practice exam and check your pacing lands under 2 minutes 20 seconds per question
- 5Schedule the exam, confirming your AWS Certification Account name matches your ID exactly
- 1Do short review sessions only, focused on decision tables rather than new material
- 2Run the AWS Exam Demo at Pearson VUE and practise the flag and review controls
- 3If testing online, run the Pearson VUE system test on the exact machine and network you will use
- 4Plan the 180 minutes: a checkpoint at question 25 and again at question 50 to check pacing
- 5Confirm your ID documents and, at a test center, plan to arrive 15 to 30 minutes early
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Best Study Resources
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam guide (SAP-C02)
Official exam blueprintThe authoritative source for the four domains at 26, 29, 25 and 20 percent, all 20 task statements with their knowledge and skill breakdowns, the 750 passing score, and the current emerging-topics list.
Free
AWS Skill Builder Exam Prep Plan: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
Official learning planAWS's four-step plan of sample questions, gap-filling digital courses, domain review with flashcards and instructor walkthroughs, then a readiness practice exam.
Free tier plus paid Individual subscription for the full set
AWS Certification Official Practice Exam for Solutions Architect - Professional
Official practiceThe only practice material written by the same team that writes the exam. For SAP-C02 the value is calibrating question length and stem density, which third-party sets often understate.
Included with an AWS Skill Builder Individual subscription
AWS Well-Architected Framework documentation
Official whitepaper setThe exam guide states that every validated task sits within the Well-Architected Framework. Read all six pillar documents, since the exam's preferred answer is usually the one that satisfies the stated constraint with the least operational overhead.
Free
AWS Prescriptive Guidance on migration strategies (the 7Rs)
Official guidanceDomain 4 names the seven common migration strategies explicitly. This guidance defines retire, retain, rehost, relocate, repurchase, replatform and refactor, and gives the decision criteria the exam expects you to apply.
Free
AWS Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS whitepaper
Official whitepaperDefines backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and multi-site active/active with their RTO and RPO characteristics. Scenarios that quote an RTO and RPO in the stem are answered directly from this document.
Free
Adrian Cantrill, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional course
Video course with labsDeep, mechanism-first coverage with build-along demos for transit gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid DNS and multi-account setups, which are the hardest topics to learn from reading alone.
Paid one-off purchase
Stephane Maarek and Neal Davis, AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional courses on Udemy
Video course and practice examsLecture coverage plus practice sets aligned to SAP-C02. Useful for breadth after you already have hands-on time, and for exposure to long-stem question formats.
Paid, price varies with Udemy promotions
Tutorials Dojo practice exams for SAP-C02
Practice questionsLong-form practice questions with explanations that cite AWS documentation. The scenario length is closer to the real exam than most sets, which makes them useful for pacing practice as well as content.
Paid
AWS Architecture Center and AWS Solutions Library
Official reference architecturesReference architectures for landing zones, hybrid connectivity, disaster recovery and data platforms. Reading real designs builds the pattern recognition the exam rewards more efficiently than memorising service limits.
Free
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Treating SAP-C02 as a harder version of the Solutions Architect - Associate exam and studying the same material more deeply.
The associate exam asks which service fits. The professional exam asks which design satisfies four simultaneous constraints across accounts and business units. Rebuild your study around the 20 task statements in the exam guide, more than half of which have no associate-level equivalent.
Reading the answer options before finishing the scenario, which is tempting when stems run several paragraphs.
Read the whole stem first and note the hard constraints: the RTO, the RPO, the cost ceiling, the compliance rule and the deadline. Options are written so that several work technically, and only one meets every constraint.
Losing credit on multiple-response questions by selecting the two most obvious answers out of three required.
The SAP-C02 exam guide states you must select all the correct responses to receive credit. There is no partial marking. Count the options, read whether the question asks for two or three, and check your selection count before moving on.
Underpreparing Domain 4 because migration feels like consultancy work rather than architecture.
It is 20 percent of the scored content, roughly 13 of the 65 scored questions. Learn the 7Rs with a real example for each, and be able to choose among AWS DMS, Application Migration Service, DataSync, Transfer Family and the Snow Family by data volume, bandwidth and cutover window.
Answering multi-account questions with IAM roles alone and ignoring service control policies and AWS Organizations structure.
A service control policy sets the maximum available permission and cannot grant anything. If a scenario mentions an organizational unit, a guardrail or a compliance boundary, check whether the correct answer is a policy at the organization level rather than a role in the account.
Choosing the most capable option rather than the one with the lowest operational overhead.
Task 2.1 names adopting managed services to reduce provisioning and patching overhead. When two options both meet the requirement, the managed or serverless one is usually the intended answer, unless the scenario states a constraint that rules it out.
Confusing what Direct Connect, VPN, transit gateway, VPC peering and PrivateLink each solve.
Build a table on one page: peering is non-transitive, transit gateway is transitive and Regional, PrivateLink exposes a single service endpoint without route exchange, Direct Connect is dedicated bandwidth with no encryption by default, and VPN adds encryption over the internet or over Direct Connect.
Ignoring data transfer costs when comparing designs.
Task 2.6 names data transfer modelling explicitly. Cross-AZ, cross-Region, NAT gateway processing and internet egress all price differently, and cost-focused questions frequently turn on replacing a NAT gateway path with a VPC endpoint.
Panicking mid-exam at unfamiliar generative AI service names.
AWS includes unscored pretest questions on emerging topics, currently Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, AgentCore Identity and Step Functions approval workflows. These carry no score weight. Answer, flag, and move on rather than spending four minutes on a question that cannot affect your result.
Exam Day Tips
- 1
You have 180 minutes for 75 questions, about 2 minutes 24 seconds each including reading. Set pacing checkpoints at question 25 and question 50 rather than tracking every question.
- 2
Multiple-response questions on this exam give no partial credit, so verify your selection count matches what the question asked for before you advance.
- 3
The exam uses short names for some AWS services, with the full mapping behind the Help button. Open it once at the start of the exam so you know where it is.
- 4
Test center candidates need two primary IDs, or one primary and one secondary. Online proctored candidates need one primary ID. Names must be identical to your AWS Certification Account, and account name changes take two business days to process.
- 5
At a test center arrive 15 to 30 minutes early. Testing online, you can launch up to 30 minutes early, and being more than 15 minutes late forfeits the 300 USD fee.
- 6
There are no scheduled breaks. In a test center an unscheduled break runs the clock and you cannot leave the building. Online proctored, no breaks are permitted and you may not leave the camera view, which is a real consideration across a three-hour session.
- 7
The Candidate Code of Conduct screen has a five-minute limit, and timing out on it ends the exam with no refund.
- 8
The on-screen Comment button subtracts from your exam time. Flag questions during the exam and add comments only after your final review.
- 9
The end-of-exam review screen filters by all, incomplete or flagged questions. Aim to reach it with 15 minutes left, because long-stem questions take longer to re-read than you expect.
- 10
Most AWS exams do not show pass or fail on screen. Detailed results appear in your AWS Certification Account under Exam History within five business days.
Career Paths & Salary Ranges
Senior or lead solutions architect
Owns architecture decisions across several applications and teams, including account structure, connectivity and governance. Domain 1 at 26 percent is close to a description of this role's decision surface.
$140k-$200k
Cloud architect on a platform or landing zone team
Designs the multi-account foundation other teams build on, using AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, IAM Identity Center and centralized logging. The exam's governance content maps to this work directly.
$140k-$200k
Migration lead or cloud migration architect
Runs portfolio assessment, wave planning and cutover for enterprise migrations. Domain 4 covers exactly this, from the 7Rs and total cost of ownership through to selecting DMS, Application Migration Service or the Snow Family.
$140k-$200k
Principal engineer with cloud architecture ownership
Sets technical direction and reviews designs across an organization. The continuous improvement domain at 25 percent is the review skill this role uses most: finding the single change that fixes the stated problem.
$140k-$200k
Cloud consultant or AWS partner solutions architect
Advises customers on design, migration and cost across engagements. AWS runs a dedicated AWS Partner Training track and lists partner-specific scheduling guidance, so the credential is widely held on partner delivery teams.
$140k-$200k
FinOps or cloud economics architect
Owns spend visibility, tagging strategy, purchasing commitments and rightsizing. Cost optimization appears as a named task in three of the four domains, including Cost and Usage Report analysis and data transfer modelling.
$140k-$200k
Prerequisites & Requirements
- There are no mandatory prerequisites. AWS states that all AWS Certifications may be earned without completing specific prerequisites, and holding an associate-level certification is not required.
- AWS recommends two or more years of experience using AWS services to design and implement cloud solutions.
- AWS expects the candidate to be able to evaluate cloud application requirements, make architectural recommendations for deployment, and give expert guidance on architectural design across multiple applications and projects within a complex organization.
- The exam guide lists frontend development for mobile apps, the 12-factor app methodology, and in-depth operating system knowledge as out of scope for the target candidate.
- Candidates must be at least 13 years old, with parental or guardian consent required for candidates aged 13 to 17.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam cost?
The exam costs 300 USD. AWS publishes professional-level prices in local currency as 256 EUR, 449 AUD, 40,000 JPY, 394,575 KRW, 2,113 CNY, and 25,659 INR through the Pearson Mindhub voucher store. Taxes such as VAT may be added, and AWS updates foreign exchange rates at least annually in May with a minimum of 30 days notice.
What is the passing score for SAP-C02?
The minimum passing score is 750 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000. That is 30 points higher than AWS associate exams, which require 720. Only 65 of the 75 questions are scored, and the model is compensatory, so you need 750 overall rather than a pass in each of the four domains.
How many questions are there and how much time do I get?
There are 75 questions and 180 minutes. Sixty-five questions affect your score and 10 are unscored pretest items that are not identified. That works out to roughly 2 minutes 24 seconds per question, which is tight given how long the scenarios run.
Do I need the Solutions Architect - Associate certification first?
No. AWS states that all AWS Certifications may be earned without completing specific prerequisites, so an associate-level certification is not required to sit this exam. AWS recommends two or more years of hands-on experience using AWS services to design and implement cloud solutions instead.
What happens if I fail?
You must wait 14 calendar days before retaking it, and there is no limit on attempts. You pay the full 300 USD each time, so a failed attempt is the most expensive mistake in the AWS certification catalogue. Failing to appear, or cancelling inside 24 hours of the appointment, forfeits the fee. Once you pass, you cannot retake the same exam for two years unless AWS publishes a new version with a new exam series code.
How long do results take?
Detailed results appear in your AWS Certification Account under Exam History within five business days, and AWS emails you when they are posted. Most AWS exams do not display pass or fail on screen at the end of the session. A Credly badge notification sometimes arrives before the score report.
How does the scaled score and section feedback work?
Scores are reported on a 100 to 1,000 scale so results can be equated across exam forms of slightly different difficulty, which means the scale is not a percentage correct. Your report may include a table classifying your performance per domain. AWS advises reading it with caution because domains have different question counts.
Is partial credit given on multiple-response questions?
No. The SAP-C02 exam guide states that on multiple response questions you must select all the correct responses to receive credit for the question. Selecting two of three correct answers earns nothing for that question.
What identification do I need?
One primary ID for an online proctored exam, and two primary IDs or one primary plus one secondary at a test center. A primary ID must be original, unexpired, government-issued, with your name in Roman characters, a recent photo and a visible signature. Digital, photocopied and laminated paper IDs are not accepted, and the name must match your AWS Certification Account exactly.
Can I take a break during a three-hour exam?
There are no scheduled breaks. At a test center you may take an unscheduled break, but the clock keeps running, you cannot leave the building, and you must repeat check-in to return. For online proctored exams no breaks are permitted at all and you may not leave the camera view, which is worth planning for across 180 minutes.
Can I use a calculator or reference materials?
No external reference material is allowed, and cost questions are written so that arithmetic is not required, only comparison. The only in-exam reference is the AWS service short-name list behind the Help button. Test center rules on erasable note boards come from the Pearson VUE Candidate Rules Agreement.
Are accommodations available?
Yes. Accommodations are arranged with Pearson VUE and must be requested before you schedule each exam. AWS separately offers an ESL +30 accommodation adding 30 minutes for non-native English speakers taking an exam in English, which takes a 180-minute exam to 210 minutes. Request it once and it applies to all future registrations.
How do I recertify?
The certification is valid for three years and is recertified by passing the current version of this exam. No other AWS certification recertifies it automatically, which differs from the associate exams that AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional can recertify. AWS certifications do not use continuing education credits.
Can I reschedule or cancel?
Yes, up to 24 hours before your appointment without an additional fee, through your AWS Certification Account. Each appointment can be rescheduled twice only. Inside the 24-hour window the full delivery fee is charged, although Pearson VUE will waive it with documentation for illness or an unforeseen emergency.
How does this compare to AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional?
Both are professional level and cost 300 USD, but DevOps Engineer - Professional centres on pipelines, deployment automation, monitoring and incident response, while Solutions Architect - Professional centres on design across organizations, migration and cost. DevOps Engineer - Professional also recertifies the associate credentials automatically, and this exam does not.
How does it compare to Solutions Architect - Associate?
The associate exam is 150 USD, 130 minutes, 65 questions and a 720 passing score, and tests single-workload design. This exam is 300 USD, 180 minutes, 75 questions and a 750 passing score, and tests design across many accounts and teams with layered constraints. Question stems are several times longer, which is the change most candidates underestimate.
Will the exam test generative AI services?
Only in unscored pretest questions. AWS currently lists security and responsible AI controls as an emerging topic for this exam, covering Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, access control for agentic AI applications through AgentCore Identity, and human approval workflows built on AWS Step Functions. Those questions do not affect your score.
Do I get a discount on my next AWS exam?
Yes. Earning any AWS Certification gives you a 50 percent discount voucher for your next AWS Certification exam, available from the Benefits section of your AWS Certification Account within five business days of passing. Applied to a 300 USD specialty exam it saves 150 USD.
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