About This Domain
Domain 2 — Design for New Solutions — accounts for 29% of the SAP-C02 certification exam. This domain evaluates your understanding of selecting compute, storage, database, networking, and integration services for new requirements, designing secure application architectures with identity, encryption, edge protection, and private access, creating resilient and highly available systems with decoupling, scaling, failover, and disaster recovery, and related concepts. Domain 2 is the largest SAP-C02 domain and focuses on designing new workloads that satisfy security, reliability, performance, and business requirements. 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 compute, storage, database, networking, and integration services for new requirements
- Designing secure application architectures with identity, encryption, edge protection, and private access
- Creating resilient and highly available systems with decoupling, scaling, failover, and disaster recovery
- Choosing database and storage services based on access patterns, consistency, latency, durability, and cost
- Designing event-driven, serverless, containerized, and globally distributed architectures
Key AWS Services in This Domain
Study Strategy for Domain 2
This domain represents 29% 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 2
SAP-C02 scenarios often describe business constraints first. Translate them into architecture qualities before choosing services.
Use managed services when operational burden must be minimized.
Decouple components with queues, topics, events, and workflows when failures or traffic spikes must be absorbed.
Always align DR choices with RPO and RTO. Active-active is powerful but expensive and complex.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many questions on the SAP-C02 exam come from Domain 2?
Domain 2 (Design for New Solutions) makes up 29% of the SAP-C02 exam. The exam has 65 scored questions, so approximately 19 questions will come from this domain.
What services should I focus on for Domain 2?
The key services for this domain include Compute, Containers, Serverless, Application Integration, Databases, RDS & Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, Resilience, Disaster Recovery, CloudFront. Make sure you understand how each service works, its use cases, and how they integrate with one another.
How should I prepare for Design for New Solutions 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 SAP-C02 domains?
Many candidates start with the highest-weighted domains first. For the SAP-C02 exam, the domains in order of weight are: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity (26%), Design for New Solutions (29%), Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions (25%), Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization (20%). However, start with whichever domain aligns best with your existing experience.
Practice Domain 2 Questions
Test your knowledge of Design for New Solutions with practice questions from our SAP-C02 question bank.
Start Practice Quiz →