The knowledge required is organized into four test “domains”. Within each test domain, several objectives broadly describe the knowledge and experience required to pass the exam. Here is a breakdown of the four domains:

Domain Percentage of Exam
Domain 1: Design Resilient Architectures 30%
Domain 2: Design High-Performing Architectures 28%
Domain 3: Design Secure Applications and Architectures 24%
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 18%

Test domain 1: Design Resilient Architectures

This domain makes up 30% of the exam and includes the following four objectives:

  1. Design a multi-tier architecture solution.
  2. Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures.
  3. Design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services.
  4. Choose appropriate resilient storage.

What you need to know

Here is a list of things you should know:
You need to understand the various block, file, and object storage technologies such as Amazon EBS, Instance Store, Amazon EFS, Amazon S3, and Amazon FSx and know their use cases.
You must be able to design multi-tier application architectures and know how to decouple application components using technologies such as Amazon SQS and Amazon SWF.
The architectures also need to be highly available in the case of component failure and should be able to recover in the case of major outages, and so you need to know the various ways of implementing high availability and fault tolerance.
Technologies you need to understand include Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, Amazon RDS Read Replicas, and Multi-AZ.
You also need to understand the AWS Global Infrastructure in order to determine how to design application stacks to best use the underlying infrastructure architecture.

Here are some example questions you can expect from this test domain:

1

You are a solutions architect at a media company, and you need to build an application stack that can receive customer comments from sporting events. The application is expected to receive a significant load that could scale to millions of messages within a short space of time following high-profile matches.

As you are unsure of the load required for the database layer, what is the most cost-effective way to ensure that the messages are not dropped?

A)

Use RDS Auto Scaling for the database layer, which will automatically scale as required.

B)

Create an SQS queue and modify the application to write to the SQS queue. Launch another application instance that polls the queue and writes messages to the database.

C)

Write the data to an S3 bucket and configure RDS to poll the bucket for new messages.

D)

Use DynamoDB, and provision enough write capacity to handle the highest expected load.

Question 1 of 20 attempted

Test domain 2: Design High-Performing Architectures

This domain makes up 28% of the exam and includes the following objectives:

  1. Identify elastic and scalable compute solutions for a workload.
  2. Select high-performing and scalable storage solutions for a workload.
  3. Select high-performing networking solutions for a workload.
  4. Choose high-performing database solutions for a workload.

What you need to know

Here is a list of things you should know:
You need to be able to select the best storage and database services to use for a given scenario, taking into account requirements for performance.
You must know how to implement elasticity and scalability to your application architectures effectively. This means understanding what to use and how to build at an architectural and implementation level.
Elasticity and scalability services that you need to understand include AWS Auto Scaling and EC2 Auto Scaling. You also need to understand how to implement these features at the application, storage, and database layers of your application using AWS technology.

Here are some example questions you can expect from this test domain:

1

A developer is creating a solution for a real-time bidding application for a large retail company that allows users to bid on end-of-season clothing items. The application is expected to be extremely popular, and the backend DynamoDB database may not perform as required.

How can the solutions architect enable in-memory read performance with microsecond response times for the DynamoDB database?

A)

Configure DynamoDB Auto Scaling.

B)

Enable Read Replicas.

C)

Increase the provisioned throughput.

D)

Configure Amazon DAX.

Question 1 of 20 attempted