AWS SAA-C03 Study Plan: How to Prepare in 60 Days

Sixty days is realistic if you can study about 8–10 hours a week and you already know basic IT concepts. Beginners should plan 90 days.

Weeks 1–2: Identity, networking and compute

• IAM users, roles and policies, and the shared responsibility model.
• VPC: subnets, route tables, internet and NAT gateways, security groups and NACLs.
• EC2 purchasing options, EBS volumes and AMIs.

Weeks 3–4: Storage and databases

• S3 storage classes, versioning, lifecycle and encryption.
• RDS Multi-AZ versus read replicas, Aurora and DynamoDB basics.
• EFS and when to use it instead of EBS.

Weeks 5–6: Resilience, scaling and decoupling

• Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling.
• SQS, SNS and EventBridge for decoupled designs.
• Route 53 routing policies and CloudFront.

Weeks 7–8: Security, cost and practice

• KMS, CloudTrail, GuardDuty and WAF at a high level.
• Cost tools and pricing models.
• Two or three timed practice exams, reviewing every wrong answer.

Do one hands-on lab per topic in your own free-tier account. The exam asks which design fits a scenario, and labs make that choice obvious. Try our free practice quiz at /tools/aws-saa-practice-quiz to check where you stand.