Resources
Official material that covers all four domains. Start with the exam guide, then use the whitepapers and FAQs to close the gaps your practice questions reveal.
The exam page, the exam guide with its service lists, and the free and paid prep that AWS publishes on Skill Builder.
On the exam
The free Official Practice Question Set (20 questions) on Skill Builder shows the exact question style. Take it early to calibrate, and keep the full Official Practice Exam for the final week.
Well-Architected
AWS Well-Architected Framework
The framework the exam validates designs against, plus one whitepaper per pillar with the detailed best practices.
On the exam
Read the Security and Reliability pillars first: together they match Domains 1 and 2, more than half of the scored content.
Long-form AWS guidance on disaster recovery, the service catalog and reference architectures, useful for the scenario questions.
On the exam
The DR whitepaper is the source of backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and multi-site active/active. Know how RTO, RPO and cost move between them.
Entry points into the AWS documentation for the infrastructure and the services the exam leans on most.
On the exam
Use the documentation to confirm a limit or a behavior after a practice question surprises you. Service quotas matter on the exam, e.g. raising them in a standby Region before a failover.
The service FAQs answer the comparison and limit questions that scenarios are built on, in short form.
On the exam
Prioritize S3, EC2, VPC, RDS, DynamoDB and SQS: they carry the storage classes, purchase options, networking, Multi-AZ versus read replicas, capacity modes and queue limits that the exam asks most.
Previous step
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
The foundational certification that usually comes before this one, with study notes in the same format.
On the exam
Cloud Practitioner covers what each service is. The Associate exam assumes that and asks which design best meets a requirement.