u/momotaroking

I appreciate all the people who shared their tips and tricks and helped answer questions. I wanted to give back to this subreddit.

Timeline: 24 days (September 9th - October 3rd)

Past experience: Two SWE Internships, no cloud experience

Materials:

Stephane Maarek SAA course
- Finished the course in about 18 days
- Took notes in Google Docs on a second monitor pausing when necessary. I ended up not even reading my notes after finishing the course
- Skipped the hands on practice
Tutorial Dojo practice test
- Finished all practice exams in review mode only
- Scores were:
  - Practice Exam: 69% (Stephen Maarek)
  - Test 1: 70% (TD)
  - Test 2: 58% (TD)
  - Test 3: 71% (TD)
  - Test 4: 60% (TD)
  - Test 5: 66% (TD)
  - Test 6: 75% (TD)
  - Test 7: 73% (TD)
  - Test 8: 83% (TD)
  - Test 2 (retake): 82% (TD)
  - Practice Exam (retake): 92% (Stephen Maarek)
- Try to explain to yourself why the correct answer is correct, and why the others are wrong.
- Kept a Google Doc on topics to review, which was very helpful

Test Day: I flagged around 10 Questions and finished in 70 minutes. I did a quick review of the flagged questions and submitted. I did not review questions I didn't flag because I found that in school I will second guess myself a lot. If you have the time, I definitely recommend to use it all.

Opinion: The test is worded simpler than TD exams (in my opinion). The questions themselves are very slightly easier than TD. One thing that was a lot easier is that I feel that there are no "unfair" questions, unlike in TD (like my bad I didn't know that if a certain resource is made using AWS CLI, some settings are different than if it was made using console). I've done a lot of complaining on here about TD questions lol.

Extra Details:

Took the exam on site. Process was very smooth. I was able to have a white board and expo marker
Questions can be flagged and reviewed at the end
I took the exam in the morning and received results on the same day in the afternoon. Around 8 hours of waiting.

Feel free to ask questions that are appropriate!

I made a previous post here two conflicting answers for practice exam questions from TD and Stephen Maarek, but I keep on coming across outdated exam questions as I am practicing.

For example, this question posted below:

A company has a web application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure that they want to migrate to AWS cloud. Your manager has instructed you to ensure that there is no downtime while the migration process is on-going. In order to achieve this, your team decided to divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure. Once the migration is over and the application works with no issues, a full diversion to AWS will be implemented. The company’s VPC is connected to its on-premises network via an AWS Direct Connect connection.

Which of the following are the possible solutions that you can implement to satisfy the above requirement? (Select TWO.)

A. Use an Application Elastic Load balancer with Weighted Target Groups to divert and proportion the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
B. Use a Network Load balancer with Weighted Target Groups to divert the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
C. Use Route 53 with Failover routing policy to divert and proportion the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
D. Use Route 53 with Weighted routing policy to divert the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.
E. Use AWS Global Accelerator to divert and proportion the HTTP and HTTPS traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Ensure that the on-premises network has an AnyCast static IP address and is connected to your VPC via a Direct Connect Gateway.

Option A and D were the correct options. It explains that Option B is not possible because NLB's can't have Weighted Target Groups. This is simply incorrect. AWS supports Weighted Target Groups for NLBs since November 2025

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/network-load-balancer-weighted-target-groups/

Passed SAA-C03 in 24 days - Score 858/1000

Warning about practice exam questions! (Review both correct and incorrect answers)