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The SAA-C03 exam prep reading list is short and it is not optional:
Two whitepapers and six service FAQs. Every one of them is a web page, and nobody reads eight web pages in a car. So this module exists for one reason: to get the reading list into your ears.
That is also why the module is structured the way it is. The lessons are grouped by what you'd be asked in an exam question, not by document — because the FAQs overlap constantly and reading them sequentially wastes your time.
The exam guide describes four content domains and fourteen task statements, all phrased in terms of designing things. But a design decision is made of facts: a subnet cannot span Availability Zones, a Multi-AZ standby cannot serve reads, VPC peering is not transitive, FIFO queues top out at a specific throughput.
Those facts live in the FAQs, in AWS's own wording, and the exam's distractors are built out of plausible-sounding violations of them. Which is why the FAQs are not background reading — they are the answer key for the "is this option even possible?" filter you apply before you start weighing trade-offs.
The Framework tells you how to think. The FAQs tell you what is possible. You need both, and they fail in different ways.
WELL-ARCHITECTED SERVICE FAQs
──────────────── ────────────
6 pillars "A subnet must reside within
6 general design principles a single Availability Zone."
7 security design principles
"Transitive peering
Answers: which trade-off relationships are not supported."
did they ask about?
Answers: is this option
Fails as: too abstract to even possible?
eliminate an option
Fails as: no help choosing
between two possible options
An exam question you get wrong for Framework reasons looks different from one you get wrong for FAQ reasons — and the fix is different too. Track which kind you're missing.
| # | Lesson | Source | Read | Listen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Well-Architected Framework | Framework whitepaper | 20 min | 8 min |
| 2 | The Security Pillar | Security Pillar whitepaper | 22 min | 8 min |
| 3 | Compute and storage — EC2 and S3 FAQs | EC2 + S3 FAQs | 26 min | 9 min |
| 4 | Networking — VPC and Route 53 FAQs | VPC + Route 53 FAQs | 24 min | 11 min |
| 5 | Data and messaging — RDS and SQS FAQs | RDS + SQS FAQs | 24 min | 11 min |
Then: Cheat sheet · Lab · Quiz · Interview
The reading list names a whitepaper called AWS Security Best Practices. Searching for it surfaces archived PDFs — versions from July 2018 and July 2020 — carrying AWS's historical-reference notice, and AWS's current live document covering that material is the Security Pillar of the Well-Architected Framework, publication date November 6, 2024.
So lesson 2 is built on the live Security Pillar, not on the archived PDF. I could not verify that a current standalone whitepaper by the name "AWS Security Best Practices" still exists — if you find one, read it, but don't study from an archived PDF when a maintained document covers the same ground.
It does not replace reading the FAQs. It covers what those pages say about the topics the exam guide's task statements actually name, and it flags every place where I could not verify a claim from the page I fetched. The FAQ pages are long, they change, and several of them are partly marketing. Where a number matters, this module says where it came from and when.
Facts verified 2026-09-21 against the pages cited in each lesson.
Keeps playing into the following modules — 326 min from here to the end of certification prep.