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Exam Information
Official specifications published by Amazon
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Skills this practice test covers
- Join many VPCs and on-premises networks through AWS Transit Gateway and AWS Direct Connect.
- Govern many accounts with AWS Organizations, service control policies and AWS Control Tower.
- Choose a disaster recovery strategy that meets a workload's recovery time and recovery point objectives.
- Remove single points of failure from a system that already runs, without a rebuild.
- Cut the cost of a running workload with rightsizing, Savings Plans and Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering.
- Assign one of the 7Rs to each workload and choose the AWS service that moves it.
Explore related topics
SAP-C02 exam content
4 domains · 29 topics · 329 of 1,053 questions are written for SAP-C02
Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity26%90 questions
This domain covers what many teams share: accounts, networks, identity and cost reporting. Candidates design how accounts connect to each other and to on-premises sites, and how security and spending are controlled from one place.
Skills tested
- Join VPCs and data centers with AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Direct Connect and AWS Site-to-Site VPN.
- Resolve DNS names in both directions between AWS and a data center with Amazon Route 53 Resolver.
- Set guardrails for every account with AWS Organizations, service control policies and AWS Control Tower.
- Grant cross-account access through AWS IAM Identity Center and IAM roles with least privilege.
- Split spending by team with cost allocation tags, AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer.
Questions by topic
- Design reliable and resilient architectures4
- Design a multi-account AWS environment18
- Architect network connectivity strategies35
- Prescribe security controls18
- Determine cost optimization and visibility strategies11
- Determine security controls based on requirements4
Design for New Solutions29%110 questions
The largest domain starts from a list of requirements and asks for a new design. Candidates decide how the workload is deployed, how it survives a failure, how it is secured, and how it meets its performance and cost goals.
Skills tested
- Deploy infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation and release changes through AWS CodePipeline.
- Pick backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby or multi-site active-active for a stated recovery target.
- Decouple components with Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS and Amazon EventBridge so one failure does not stop the rest.
- Meet a performance goal with the right compute, storage and database services, plus caching in Amazon ElastiCache or Amazon CloudFront.
- Match each part of a workload to On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans or Spot Instances.
Questions by topic
- Determine security controls based on requirements25
- Design a solution to ensure business continuity10
- Design a solution to meet performance objectives32
- Design reliable and resilient architectures4
- Design a deployment strategy to meet business requirements13
- Design a strategy to meet reliability requirements11
- Design for new solutions3
- Determine cost optimization and visibility strategies3
- Determine a cost optimization strategy3
- Design a deployment strategy5
- Architect network connectivity strategies1
Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions25%72 questions
Here the system already runs, and the task is to improve it without starting again. Candidates find weak points in operations, security, performance, reliability and cost, and choose the change that fixes each one.
Skills tested
- Add monitoring and automatic remediation with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config and AWS Systems Manager.
- Trace a slow request with AWS X-Ray and fix the bottleneck it reveals.
- Add self-healing with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing across Availability Zones.
- Collect security findings in AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty, and automate the fixes.
- Find idle and oversized resources with AWS Compute Optimizer and AWS Trusted Advisor.
Questions by topic
- Determine a strategy to improve performance20
- Determine a strategy to improve reliability15
- Determine a strategy to improve security16
- Identify opportunities for cost optimizations13
- Determine a strategy to improve overall operational excellence8
Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization20%57 questions
This domain moves existing workloads to AWS and improves them on the way. Candidates assess what to move, pick a strategy and a tool for each workload, and design the architecture it runs on afterwards.
Skills tested
- Classify workloads with the 7Rs, such as rehost, replatform and refactor.
- Discover servers with AWS Application Discovery Service and build a business case on total cost of ownership.
- Move servers with AWS Application Migration Service and databases with AWS DMS and AWS SCT.
- Choose AWS DataSync, AWS Transfer Family or the AWS Snow Family for a data transfer.
- Modernize a migrated application with containers on Amazon ECS or AWS Fargate, or with AWS Lambda.
Questions by topic
- Determine a new architecture for existing workloads11
- Determine opportunities for modernization and enhancements17
- Determine the optimal migration approach for existing workloads18
- Determine the optimal migration approach2
- Determine opportunities for modernization2
- Select existing workloads and processes for potential migration5
- Determine new architecture for existing workloads2
Requirements
- No formal prerequisites: anyone can book the exam.
- Recommended: at least two years of hands-on work designing and deploying solutions on AWS.
- Recommended: experience with distributed systems and with advising on architecture across several applications.
- Recommended: the Solutions Architect Associate certification as groundwork; AWS does not require it.
About the SAP-C02 exam
SAP-C02 tests the design decisions an AWS architect makes for a whole organization, from account structure and hybrid networks to disaster recovery and migration. Passing it earns the AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification at the Professional level, the top of AWS's architect track. Most questions describe a company, its requirements and a goal. The best answer meets every requirement, and cost or the effort needed to run a design often decides between two that work.
Each explanation in the PlanetCert practice test says why the right design fits the scenario and why the other options fail, so candidates learn to check every requirement. Study mode suits Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity, where answers depend on how networking and account services behave. Timed mode then builds the reading pace that long scenarios need. When an explanation leaves a doubt, Brainy AI Assistant can compare two close options, such as pilot light and warm standby.
How to earn the certification
- Earns
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - ProfessionalProfessional
The certification stays valid for three years. Passing the current version of the exam renews it.
- Before
- SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
Recommended groundwork, not a requirement. It covers the single-workload designs that this exam extends across an organization.
- SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
- After
- SCS-C03 AWS Certified Security - Specialty
A specialty exam that goes deeper into the identity, encryption and detection controls an architect prescribes.
- SCS-C03 AWS Certified Security - Specialty
How to prepare for SAP-C02
- 1
Draw a multi-account network
Sketch an organization with several accounts, one AWS Transit Gateway and a Direct Connect link to a data center, then add Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid DNS. Many scenarios in the first domain assume a layout like this.
- 2
Test guardrails in a sandbox organization
Create organizational units in a test organization, attach a service control policy, and watch it block an action that an IAM policy allows. Seeing that once makes the permission questions easier to reason about.
- 3
Rehearse a Region failover
Run a small app with a database replica in a second Region and fail it over. Compare the downtime with what backup and restore, pilot light and warm standby would give.
- 4
Give new designs the most hours
Design for New Solutions carries the most weight. Practise turning a requirement list into a design, then check the design against each requirement: deployment, recovery, security, performance and cost.
- 5
Finish with timed scenario sets
Work through the SAP-C02 practice test in study mode, one domain at a time, then switch to timed mode. Read the explanations for correct answers too, because the wrong options show the traps.
Start a timed SAP-C02run
AWS recommends the instructor-led course Advanced Architecting on AWS for this exam. AWS Skill Builder also offers an exam prep plan for this certification.
Who SAP-C02 is for
- Architects with the Solutions Architect Associate certification who now design for several teams or business units.
- Cloud architects who plan a large move from on-premises data centers to AWS.
- Consultants who review AWS designs for reliability, security and cost across many accounts.
- Technical leads who own a company's AWS account structure and network.
Typical job titles: Solutions architect · Cloud architect · Enterprise architect · Cloud consultant · Technical lead · Principal engineer
SAP-C02 glossary
18 terms from the exam objectives and the vendor's official material, each defined in a sentence.
- 7Rs
- AWS's seven migration strategies. They range from leaving a workload where it is to rebuilding it for the cloud.
- Amazon Route 53 Resolver
- The DNS service built into each VPC. Its inbound and outbound endpoints pass DNS queries between AWS and on-premises servers.
- AWS Application Migration Service
- The AWS service that copies running servers to AWS and launches them there, with no changes to the application.
- AWS CloudFormation StackSets
- A CloudFormation feature that deploys the same stack to many accounts and Regions in one operation.
- AWS Control Tower
- A service that sets up a governed multi-account environment and applies ready-made controls to each new account.
- AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
- The AWS service that copies a database to AWS, or to another engine, while the source database stays in use.
- AWS Direct Connect
- A dedicated private network link between a data center and AWS that does not cross the public internet.
- AWS IAM Identity Center
- A single place to give people sign-in access to many AWS accounts and business applications.
- AWS Organizations
- An AWS service that groups many accounts under one management account, with shared billing and central policies.
- AWS Transit Gateway
- A regional network hub that connects many VPCs and on-premises networks, so each network needs only one connection.
- AWS Well-Architected Framework
- AWS's guidance for judging a design against six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability.
- Pilot light
- A disaster recovery strategy that keeps data copied and core resources ready in a second Region, and starts the rest only in a disaster.
- Recovery point objective (RPO)
- The most data, measured as time before the failure, that the business can afford to lose.
- Recovery time objective (RTO)
- The longest time a workload may stay down after a failure before the business is harmed.
- Savings Plans
- A pricing model that lowers the price of compute in return for a commitment to steady usage for one or three years.
- Service control policies (SCPs)
- Policies in AWS Organizations that set the most an account may do. They limit permissions but never grant them.
- Total cost of ownership (TCO)
- The full cost of running a workload, including hardware, facilities and staff, used to compare on-premises with AWS.
- Warm standby
- A disaster recovery strategy that runs a smaller but fully working copy of the workload in a second Region, ready to scale up.