Why This Cheat Sheet Matters for SAA-C03
This cheat sheet covers the most important Amazon Simple Storage Service concepts tested on the SAA-C03 (AWS Solutions Architect Associate) certification exam. It contains 4 sections with 24 key points that you should memorize before exam day. S3 provides scalable object storage. Master storage classes, lifecycle policies, versioning, replication, encryption, access control, and S3 event notifications. Use this as a quick-reference guide during your final review sessions.
4Sections
24Key Points
Storage Classes
- S3 Standard: 99.99% availability, 11 9s durability. Frequent access.
- S3 Standard-IA: lower cost, retrieval fee. Infrequent access, min 30 days.
- S3 One Zone-IA: single AZ, 20% cheaper than Standard-IA.
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering: auto-moves objects between tiers. No retrieval fee.
- S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: millisecond retrieval, min 90 days.
- S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: minutes to hours, min 90 days.
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive: cheapest, 12–48 hour retrieval, min 180 days.
Security & Encryption
- SSE-S3: Amazon-managed keys (default). AES-256.
- SSE-KMS: KMS-managed keys. Audit trail via CloudTrail.
- SSE-C: customer-provided keys. Must use HTTPS.
- Client-side encryption: encrypt before upload.
- Bucket policies + ACLs + IAM policies for access control.
- Block Public Access: account and bucket level settings.
Features
- Versioning: protects against accidental deletes. MFA Delete for extra security.
- Lifecycle policies: transition/expire objects automatically.
- Cross-Region Replication (CRR): requires versioning enabled on both buckets.
- Same-Region Replication (SRR): compliance, log aggregation.
- S3 Transfer Acceleration: uses CloudFront edge locations for fast uploads.
- S3 Select / Glacier Select: retrieve subset of data using SQL.
- Event Notifications: trigger Lambda, SQS, SNS on object events.
Limits
- Object size: 0 bytes to 5 TB. Multipart upload required above 5 GB.
- Bucket names: globally unique, 3–63 characters.
- 3,500 PUT/COPY/POST/DELETE and 5,500 GET/HEAD requests per second per prefix.
- No limit on objects per bucket.
Practice S3 Questions
Put your knowledge to the test with practice questions.