AWS Training and Certification Blog

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam updated to align with latest trends and innovations

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For many cloud professionals, the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is an important career milestone. The exam validates critical skills and offers a threshold that professionals can cross to show the world that they’re ready to pursue Professional and Specialty cloud certifications.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is updated as of August 30, 2022. The updates reflect increased enterprise demand for optimizations in fast-changing areas such as security, resiliency, data volume, cost optimization, and the design of high-performance systems.

New demands call for new standards

AWS Training and Certification has updated the content outline to ensure that the exam validates the latest knowledge and skills that professionals need as they design solutions in the AWS Cloud. In the new content outline, we have reordered or renumbered many of the domains and task statements from the previous content outline. However, much of the content is the same. More than 90% of the task statements that appeared in the previous content outline are covered in the new content outline.

The only new task statement that we have added is in Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures. The new task is Task Statement 5: Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.

AWS DevOps Consultant Patrick Kuny and AWS Senior Partner Solutions Architect John Culkin were part of the job task analysis (JTA) team that reviewed and updated the content outline (learn more about how AWS Certification exams are written).

“Companies have massive amounts of data that we need to interact with, transform, and load into scalable systems,” he says. “Distributed systems are more important, especially with the rise of containerization. To work in that environment, it’s important to understand how AWS tools and other components work together,” Kuny says.

“Think about the way work in the cloud has changed,” Culkin says. “In the past, the cloud was more infrastructure-as-a-service-based. Now there are higher-level services and new capabilities that you need to take advantage of to operate effectively in the cloud.”

How to prepare for the updated AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam

Kuny and Culkin advise that AWS exam preparation materials are an indispensable starting point for anyone who aims to tackle the new AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam. They also emphasize that there is no substitute for hands-on work.

Check out the following free resources that can help you understand what content and services the exam covers, in addition to the ways in which the questions are formatted and scored.

Learners who want to deepen their level of learning can upgrade to the Individual subscription plan in AWS Skill Builder to access the following resources:

For every career, an AWS learning pathway

Kuny and Culkin started their own careers on premises. The leap to the cloud is something each of them experienced first-hand, and their perspective seasoned the way they contributed to updating the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate content outline.

This exam is tough,” Culkin acknowledges. “It’s not something to jump into without prior experience. But for someone who’s been performing in a systems architecture role for at least a year, completing this exam—even studying for it—is intrinsically going to help you design better.”

“Today’s high-performing architecture is about designing a system that might have millions of operations per second—one that could serve a global audience—and be resilient and reliable. Anyone reading this could be the person to answer that challenge. And preparing for and attaining the up-to-date AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification is a solid place to start.”