About This Domain
Domain 3 — Design High-Performing Architectures — accounts for 24% of the SAA-C03 certification exam. This domain evaluates your understanding of selecting optimal compute solutions (ec2, lambda, ecs, fargate), storage performance: ebs iops, s3 transfer acceleration, cloudfront caching, database performance: read replicas, dax, elasticache, and related concepts. Domain 3 tests your knowledge of selecting high-performing and scalable storage, compute, database, and networking solutions. To pass this section you need practical knowledge of how these services and patterns work together in real-world architectures.
What You'll Be Tested On
- Selecting optimal compute solutions (EC2, Lambda, ECS, Fargate)
- Storage performance: EBS IOPS, S3 Transfer Acceleration, CloudFront caching
- Database performance: read replicas, DAX, ElastiCache
- Network optimization: CloudFront, Global Accelerator, placement groups
- Data ingestion and transformation (Kinesis, Glue)
- Caching strategies and content delivery
Key AWS Services in This Domain
Study Strategy for Domain 3
This domain represents 24% of the total exam, making it a significant scoring area. Balance theoretical study with hands-on practice. Use practice quizzes to identify weak spots and review the topics where you score below 75%.
Exam Tips for Domain 3
CloudFront is used to cache and deliver content closer to users globally.
ElastiCache Redis is preferred when persistence and advanced data structures are needed.
gp3 volumes decouple IOPS from volume size — know the baseline and max IOPS.
Use S3 Transfer Acceleration for uploads from geographically distant clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many questions on the SAA-C03 exam come from Domain 3?
Domain 3 (Design High-Performing Architectures) makes up 24% of the SAA-C03 exam. The exam has 65 scored questions, so approximately 16 questions will come from this domain.
What services should I focus on for Domain 3?
The key services for this domain include EC2, Lambda, ECS & EKS, EBS, S3, CloudFront, ElastiCache, RDS, DynamoDB, Kinesis. Make sure you understand how each service works, its use cases, and how they integrate with one another.
How should I prepare for Design High-Performing Architectures questions?
Start by reviewing the key topics listed above, then practice with domain-specific questions. Focus on understanding real-world scenarios rather than memorizing facts. Use our practice quizzes to test your knowledge and review explanations for any questions you get wrong.
What's the best order to study the SAA-C03 domains?
Many candidates start with the highest-weighted domains first. For the SAA-C03 exam, the domains in order of weight are: Design Secure Architectures (30%), Design Resilient Architectures (26%), Design High-Performing Architectures (24%), Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%). However, start with whichever domain aligns best with your existing experience.
Practice Domain 3 Questions
Test your knowledge of Design High-Performing Architectures with practice questions from our SAA-C03 question bank.
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