AWS S3 & Storage Certification Guide

Primary Certification

AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03)

Format: 65 questions | 130 minutes | 720/1000 | $150 USD (needs verification — question count, timing, passing score, and price are set by AWS and do change between exam versions; check the current SAA-C03 exam guide)

Related Certifications

•AWS Developer Associate

•AWS SysOps Administrator

Key Exam Topics

•Storage classes: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier classes

•Lifecycle policies: transition between classes, expire objects, abort multipart uploads

•Security: bucket policies, ACLs (legacy), Block Public Access, encryption (SSE-S3/KMS/C)

•Replication: CRR (cross-region) and SRR (same-region), replication rules and filters

•Performance: multipart upload (>100MB), S3 Transfer Acceleration (CloudFront edge)

•S3 Versioning: protect against accidental delete; MFA Delete for extra protection

•S3 Event Notifications: trigger Lambda, SNS, SQS on object events

Must-Know CLI Commands

bash

aws s3 mb s3://my-bucket --region us-east-1
aws s3 cp large-file.zip s3://my-bucket/ --sse aws:kms
aws s3 sync ./local-dir s3://my-bucket/prefix/ --delete
aws s3api put-bucket-versioning --bucket my-bucket --versioning-configuration Status=Enabled
aws s3api put-public-access-block --bucket my-bucket --public-access-block-configuration BlockPublicAcls=true,IgnorePublicAcls=true,BlockPublicPolicy=true,RestrictPublicBuckets=true

Exam Tips

•S3 is eventual consistent for overwrites/deletes — now fully consistent since Dec 2020

•Presigned URLs: grant temporary access without credentials. Signed with a long-term IAM user's credentials, they can be valid for up to 7 days. Signed with temporary STS credentials instead, the URL can never outlive those credentials — and STS session duration itself is capped well below 7 days (commonly up to 12 hours by default) (needs verification — exact current STS session-duration limits/defaults)

•S3 Object Lock: WORM (Write Once Read Many) for compliance

•Requester Pays: bucket owner pays storage, requester pays transfer costs

Study Plan

Week 1-2: Read official docs + overview/fundamentals sections in this platform

Week 3-4: Hands-on labs (AWS free tier / Azure sandbox / GCP free tier)

Week 5: Practice exams (TutorialsDojo, ExamTopics, Whizlabs)

Final days: Review weak areas + cheatsheet

Free Study Resources

•AWS: aws.amazon.com/training — free digital courses

•Azure: learn.microsoft.com — Microsoft Learn (free + sandbox labs)

•GCP: cloud.google.com/training — free courses + Qwiklabs credits

•TutorialsDojo: cheat sheets for all exams (best value paid resource)

Revision Notes

PRIMARY EXAM: AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03)

TOP TOPICS:
  Storage classes: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier classes
  Lifecycle policies: transition between classes, expire objects, abort multipart uploads
  Security: bucket policies, ACLs (legacy), Block Public Access, encryption (SSE-S3/KMS/C)
  Replication: CRR (cross-region) and SRR (same-region), replication rules and filters

S3 — Certification