TL;DR: CloudPrep, my free AWS exam simulator, now covers two Associate exams: Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) and Developer – Associate (DVA-C03), with 1,000 original questions each. Everything the Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) side had comes with them: Learning mode, Review due, timed mock exams, the AI proctor, results, history and sync. Still free, no ads, no paywall.
👉 Try it: aws-cloud-prepare.vercel.app
👋 Quick recap
A while ago I wrote about building CloudPrep, a free practice simulator for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam: 2,000 original questions, real-format mock exams, and an optional AI proctor that runs entirely in your browser.
The natural next step after Cloud Practitioner is an Associate exam, so that's what I built next.
🆕 What's new
| Cloud Practitioner | Solutions Architect | Developer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exam code | CLF-C02 | SAA-C03 | DVA-C03 |
| Questions in CloudPrep | 2,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Mock exam | 65 questions, 90 min | 65 questions, 130 min | 65 questions, 130 min |
| Passing score shown | 700 | 720 | 720 |
That's 4,000 questions across three exams, every option explained, every question linked to the AWS pages it's based on.
🏗️ Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)
The questions follow the four domains and weights in the official exam guide (revised in October 2026):
| Domain | Exam weight |
|---|---|
| 1. Design Secure Architectures | 30% |
| 2. Design Resilient Architectures | 26% |
| 3. Design High-Performing Architectures | 24% |
| 4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% |
💻 Developer – Associate (DVA-C03)
DVA-C03 is the new version of the Developer exam. It replaces DVA-C02, whose last exam day is 30 November 2026, so I built straight for C03 instead of a version that's about to retire.
| Domain | Exam weight |
|---|---|
| 1. Development with AWS Services | 30% |
| 2. Security | 26% |
| 3. Testing and Deployment | 22% |
| 4. Troubleshooting and Optimization | 22% |
C03 adds AI-assisted development skills to the guide, so the bank covers those too, alongside the classics: Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, Step Functions, the CI/CD services, X-Ray and CloudWatch.
🧠 What Associate questions look like
Cloud Practitioner questions mostly ask "which service does X?". Associate questions are scenarios: a requirement, a constraint (lowest cost, least operational effort, highest availability), and four or five designs that all sound reasonable.
So every wrong option in CloudPrep is a real AWS option that fails one stated constraint, and its explanation tells you which one. Here's an SAA-C03-style example:
A web application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in one Availability Zone. It must keep serving users if that zone fails, with the least operational effort. Which design meets this?
A. Take nightly AMI backups of each instance
B. An Auto Scaling group across several Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer
C. A larger instance type in the same Availability Zone
D. A second Amazon EBS volume on each instance
Show the answer
B. Spreading instances across Availability Zones behind a load balancer keeps the app running when one zone fails, and Auto Scaling replaces failed instances for you. Backups (A) help you recover, but the app is still down while you do. A bigger instance (C) or an extra volume (D) still lives in the one zone that failed.
🔍 Checking 2,000 new questions against a moving target
Like the Cloud Practitioner bank, the questions are original: written with AI assistance from public AWS documentation and each exam's official guide, then checked question by question against the AWS pages they cite. Nothing comes from the real exam or from dumps.
The interesting part was how much AWS itself had changed. The check caught questions whose "correct" answer was no longer correct:
- 📦 Snowball Edge is no longer available to new customers, so a large data-migration question now uses DataSync, and Snowball Edge became a wrong option with that reason.
- 🌐 NAT gateways can now be regional and span Availability Zones, so "one NAT gateway per zone" is no longer the only right answer.
- 🔒 S3 Block Public Access can now be set once for a whole AWS Organization, which changed the "most effective" answer to a multi-account question.
Those questions were rewritten. I also found that when AWS retires a docs page, it often redirects to the guide's home page with a normal "200 OK", so a plain link checker thinks the link still works. CloudPrep's reference checker now flags those too.
💡 If you study from older material, watch for this. Exam guides and services change; a question bank needs to keep up.
🧭 How it works in the app
- An exam switcher at the top of the navigation. Pick an exam and you land on the same section of that exam.
- Each exam has its own address (
/saa-c03,/dva-c03/practice, …), so you can bookmark or share it. - Progress, bookmarks and exam history are kept separately for each exam, and all of it syncs to your account when you sign in with Google.
- One exam in progress at a time, like a real test centre. Start another and CloudPrep asks you to finish the first.
- Learning mode still works without an account, for every exam.
🛠️ For the developers: turning a one-exam app into a multi-exam one
CloudPrep was built around CLF-C02, so adding exams meant pulling every CLF-specific assumption out of the code. The main changes:
| Change | How |
|---|---|
| Exam guides as data | Each exam is one object: code, minutes, question count, passing score, domains, weights and task statements. The exam logic takes the guide as input instead of importing CLF constants. |
| Exam in the address | Exam pages moved under /:examId. Old addresses redirect, so links shared before the update keep working. |
| One store, tagged by exam | Question IDs already carried the exam (clf-, saa-, dva-), so progress and bookmarks needed no change. Sessions and attempts gained an examId, and anything saved without one is read as CLF-C02. No data migration, nothing lost. |
| Database | Every Supabase table carries exam_id, with Row Level Security unchanged. |
| Launch switch | An exam only appears on the live site once its guide is marked launched, so visitors never see an exam without questions. |
| Pre-rendered pages | The home page and each exam's page are now written to HTML at build time, so link previews and search engines see the right title and content. React takes over the HTML in the browser. Still a static site, no server. |
🧾 Honest notes
- ⚠️ CloudPrep is not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS. A practice score doesn't predict or guarantee an official result.
- 📊 It shows the percentage you got right, against each exam's passing score as a benchmark. It does not estimate AWS's scaled 100–1,000 score.
- ✍️ Questions are original, written with AI assistance from public AWS docs and checked against the pages they cite.
🚀 Try it and tell me what you think
Preparing for Solutions Architect, Developer or Cloud Practitioner? Give it a go:
👉 aws-cloud-prepare.vercel.app
- 💬 Found a question that's wrong, unclear or out of date? Tell me in the comments. AWS changes fast, and I'd rather fix it.
- 🗳️ Which AWS exam should come next?
- ⭐ If it helps you, share it with someone who's preparing.
Good luck with your exam! ☁️
Preparing for frontend interviews too? Check out Frontend Interview Prep, with React and JavaScript interview questions and answers.
Made by Shubham Chaudhary · Portfolio
Top comments (0)