Why I Took This Cert
In my current role, I deal with a lot of AWS and architecture design problems. When I work on improvements or migrations for legacy systems, I need to show a few design options, compare them, and choose the best practice. Our company is also moving more of our infrastructure to managed services, so this cert could be helpful for my work.
More importantly, the company fully sponsored the exam fee (USD 150) and study materials (including the Udemy course and practice exams listed below!). My only job was to focus on studying and taking the exam. Given that, there was no reason not to take it.
My Background
I graduated from National Taiwan University, but not from a CS degree. I switched into software engineering over five years ago, and for the past four years I have mostly worked as a Platform Engineer. In the org chart, I sit in the Infrastructure Team and maintain internal shared services. I do not often build AWS infrastructure directly, and more often use it as a user.
Use this to judge how relevant my experience might be for you, because I believe how hard the exam feels is also related to your background.
Exam Preparation
Here’s the timeline: I started preparing around Oct 2025 and took the exam in Jan 2026, so it’s about four months. After finishing the course in the first two and a half months, I spent the remaining time reviewing and doing practice exams.
Course Material
I used a broadly recommended Udemy course: Stephane Maarek’s “Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2025”. My senior colleagues also recommended the same course, and I also wanted a video course to get a first pass through the scope in a lighter way and during meals. I finished the course, and I also strongly recommend it. The labs are helpful for understanding the step-by-step setup of AWS services, and the explanations are concise and easy to follow. I rarely needed extra reading, and it covers a large portion of the exam content, sufficient to pass the exam. The course is also kept up to date with new AWS services and feature changes. As I write this, the course title has already been updated from 2025 to 2026 lol.
For study details, I usually watched at ~1.5x to 1.75x speed. After finishing the course, I used Notion to organize notes by service categories, because reading text notes is far faster than re-watching videos, and I can add additional notes and clarifications as I go.
Practice Exams
You cannot study in a vacuum, so practice exams are necessary.
I bought the companion exam set, also by Stephane Maarek: “Prepare for your SAA-C03 exam. 390 high-quality practice test questions written from scratch with detailed explanations!”. My approach was to use timed mode as if it were the real exam: no notes and no looking things up. Sometimes I did not use a full two-hour block and worked in shorter sessions, but I made sure not to check anything in between. I usually finished a set in about 1.5 hours, then reviewed the explanations, fixed my answers, and updated my notes if I found gaps. If I still did not get it after reading the explanations, I asked Gemini 3 Pro. It helped a lot. Thanks Google, and thanks to my company for covering the subscription.
Compared to the main course, I do not strongly recommend this practice set for these reasons:
- First, some questions are too tricky and still feel ambiguous even after the answer, and sometimes even Gemini gets them wrong. My accuracy was around 70%-80%, barely passing. It helps review, but many questions are long and take time to parse.
- Second, some content is outdated, including older terms (for example, Kinesis Data Analytics is now Managed Service for Apache Flink) and older mechanisms (Launch Configuration, Origin Access Identity, etc.).
- Third, there is repetition. The main course already includes some practice questions, and those same questions show up again here, which reduces the value of a mock exam. Within a single set, there are also paraphrased duplicates, which I did not like.
So what is the alternative? Many people recommend Tutorial Dojos: “AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Practice Exams 2026”. It is about USD 15 and includes 9 practice exams. Coverage seems broader. As for what it feels like, I will leave it to future test takers.
In addition, AWS Skill Builder has an official set, “Official Practice Question Set: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate,” with 20 free questions. I strongly recommend trying it before the exam to get a quick look for the official style and difficulty.
If You Feel That You Need More Preparation Time
You can cancel or reschedule for free at least 24 hours before the exam. I originally booked for November, but a month was not enough, so I postponed to January for more time.
ESL+30
If you are not a native English speaker and take the exam in English, you can apply for “ESL+30” (English as a Second Language + 30 minutes), which extends the exam by 30 minutes. You can still submit early, so there is no downside. Just apply.
If you forget to apply before booking, it will not apply to an already scheduled exam. The solution is to cancel for free and rebook.
(I ended up canceling once and rescheduling once.)
Exam Day
There were not many test centers to choose from. The ones I could reach were all in Taipei. There are none in Xizhi or Keelung, which is not friendly for people on the north Taiwan coast. Time slots were also limited and many centers only offered weekday slots, so I took a day off, and went in the afternoon after sleeping in.
I asked Perplexity for a checklist, and it boiled down to one required item and one recommended item, which I found very practical and share here:
- Required: Two forms of ID. One must have English, so use a credit card with an English name printed on it, or a passport. For simplicity, I brought my passport.
- Recommended: A jacket. The air conditioning is strong. Even in winter, it can feel cold inside.
The official reminder says to arrive 15 minutes early, but I arrived 30 minutes early just in case. It took only 1~2 minutes to check in. Surprisingly, the staff asked if I wanted to start immediately because there was an open seat: and I realized it is first-come, first-served. I decided to started right away after restroom.
Entering the Exam Room
After check in, staff check that you are carrying nothing, including a watch. Only you can enter; the only thing you can rely on is the on-screen clock. Just focus and take the exam.
I expected a large computer lab with many people, but the testing center uses tiny individual rooms, about the size of a study cubicle, with a computer, chair, and scratch paper. The equipment is basic: the mouse tracking sometimes was not great at times (no mouse pad), and the chair is not great. If you are used to good equipment at home (like me), it can feel a bit uncomfortable. You will read some rules, and you can change the theme of the exam interface. I chose white text on black for better readability. There are also strange themes like blue text on white, which feels like a Windows error screen and is hard on the eyes. The entire exam is recorded; there is a camera above you. You can raise your hand to use the restroom, but the exam is not long, so I finished in one go. Including review, I was done in about 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Results
At 9 PM that night, I received a Credly email with my badge, which meant I officially passed. That was only 4 hours after finishing the exam. The next morning, I received the score report: 823, slightly above the bar. The report does not provide much beyond the score. It does not tell you how many were correct or incorrect, and the non-integer score suggests different weights per question.
Thoughts
The real exam was easier than Stephane’s practice tests, though it did include some content not covered in his course (I cannot provide examples due to NDA). The biggest learning takeaway for me was how much AI helped. In the past, when I did not understand something, I would search and read documentation for a long time. Now I can just ask Gemini 3 Pro and get a clear explanation in one shot. If I want deeper understanding, follow-up questions usually give good answers. I then summarize these into my Notion notes.
It also makes me wonder: if I had these AI models as a student, the learning environment might have been totally different. People who want to learn could be more self-driven and rely less on teachers, cram schools, or the class “geniuses.” But then I might not have had as many opportunities to tutor or solve problems for others in college.
As for preparation, even though I use many of these concepts at work, there are still many AWS services I rarely touch, such as Data Pipeline, Streaming, Analytics, and the ECS family. I spent a lot of time filling those gaps. During preparation, I did not study every day, but I still spent ~10 hours a week after work, and several full weekend days for studying. Therefore, before I plan to take another certification, I probably take a break first to reclaim some after-work time.
In short, I strongly recommend the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) certification. Preparing for it helped me learn many best practices and common anti-patterns. I believe this will help me propose better designs at work and avoid choices that add technical debt.
Thank you to all readers who have made it this far. I hope this article can be helpful to you. Cheers!
(The original post is written in Traditional Chinese.)