AWS Certified Solutions Architect – ProfessionalStudy guide

Understand the foundation for large organizations: AWS Organizations, Organizational Units (OUs), Service Control Policies (SCPs), consolidated billing, and Control Tower. Operate many accounts securely and with governance.

Understand secure access across accounts—cross-account IAM roles, IAM Identity Center (SSO), SAML/OIDC federation, and Resource Access Manager (RAM). Design org-wide access with least privilege.

Understand large-scale connectivity—Transit Gateway, VPC peering, PrivateLink, Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, and Route 53 Resolver. Interconnect many VPCs and on-premises efficiently.

A catalog of supporting services for organizational complexity—certificates/keys (ACM, CloudHSM), identity and directories (Cognito, Directory Service), network defense (Firewall Manager, Network Firewall), audit/compliance (Artifact, Audit Manager), cost/governance tooling (Cost and Usage Report, License Manager, Service Catalog, Well-Architected Tool, Health Dashboard, Management Console, CLI), and virtual desktops (WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0)—organized by definition, role, and when to choose.

Understand designs for availability and resilience—Multi-AZ/Multi-Region, RTO/RPO, the four DR strategies (backup & restore/pilot light/warm standby/multi-site), and Route 53 failover.

Understand elasticity and decoupling—Auto Scaling/ELB, decoupling with SQS/SNS/EventBridge, serverless (Lambda/API Gateway/Step Functions), and caching. Handle demand swings and contain failures.

Understand the right data store and protection—choosing RDS/Aurora/DynamoDB/S3 storage classes, encryption with KMS, Secrets Manager, and encryption at rest/in transit. Select secure stores that fit requirements.

Building blocks for new solutions—simple/PaaS compute (App Runner, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail), hybrid/edge (Outposts, Wavelength, ECS Anywhere, EKS Anywhere, EKS Distro), purpose-built databases (Aurora Serverless, DocumentDB, Keyspaces, Neptune, Timestream), DR/archive/hybrid storage (Elastic Disaster Recovery, S3 Glacier, Storage Gateway), and global delivery (Global Accelerator)—by definition, role, and when to choose.

Building blocks for data-driven and intelligent features—analytics (Athena, EMR, OpenSearch Service, Kinesis Data Streams, Data Firehose, MSK, Managed Service for Apache Flink, Lake Formation, QuickSight, Data Exchange, AppFlow), machine learning (SageMaker AI, Rekognition, Comprehend, Textract, Transcribe, Translate, Polly, Kendra, Personalize, Fraud Detector), IoT (IoT Core, Greengrass, SiteWise, etc.), media (Kinesis Video Streams, Elastic Transcoder), application integration (AppSync, MQ), and blockchain/email (Managed Blockchain, SES).

Understand observability and operations for improving existing systems—CloudWatch (metrics/logs/alarms), X-Ray (distributed tracing), CloudTrail (API auditing), Systems Manager, and automation. Detect issues early and automate operations.

Understand optimizing existing workloads—right-sizing, purchase options (On-Demand/RI/Savings Plans/Spot), Compute Optimizer/Cost Explorer/Budgets/Trusted Advisor, and CloudFront/caching. Keep performance while cutting waste.

Understand hardening existing systems—Well-Architected, fault isolation, GuardDuty/Security Hub/Config, WAF/Shield, and automated remediation. Continuously raise threat detection and compliance.

Supporting services for improvement and automated delivery—CI/CD pipelines (CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodeArtifact, CodeGuru), open-source-compatible observability (Managed Grafana, Managed Service for Prometheus), standardized templates (Proton), and frontend/testing (Amplify, Device Farm)—by definition, role, and when to choose.

Understand migration approaches—the 7 Rs (rehost/replatform/refactor/repurchase/retire/retain/relocate) and assessment via Migration Hub/Application Discovery Service. Pick the best path per workload.

Understand migration tools—Application Migration Service (MGN), DMS/SCT (DB migration), DataSync (online bulk transfer), the Snow Family (offline bulk), and Transfer Family. Choose by data type and connectivity.

Understand post-migration modernization—containers (ECS/EKS/Fargate), serverless, decomposing into microservices, and incremental migration via the strangler fig pattern. Improve agility, scale, and cost-efficiency.