What it is
The card deck I built while preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam over fifteen days, and passed with. An SAA question is a discrimination — four plausible architectures, one best — so every card here is a discrimination: which service, which configuration, and the one sentence that rules the alternatives out.
What's inside
- 103 notes / 103 cards, tagged by topic so you can filter any slice
(
vpc,iam,ec2,rds,route53,cloudfront,containers,cost, …). - 30 side-by-side comparison cards — security group vs network ACL, Multi-AZ standby vs read replica, gateway vs interface endpoint, cached vs stored volume gateway, Cost Explorer vs Budgets vs Cost and Usage Report.
- Configuration-boundary cards for the shape the real paper favours over the practice banks: the service is named, the question is how to configure it (ECS task role vs execution role vs instance profile, ECR pulls from a private subnet, IMDSv2 against SSRF).
- Custom styled note type travels inside the .apkg and installs on import.
- No review history — every card arrives fresh for your own schedule.
How the cards are written
One discrimination per card, free-recall front, mechanism before property list. Cards were cut from the misses in timed practice sittings, so they sit exactly where a first-time candidate is weakest. Everything is phrased in my own words from my own study notes.
Pairs well with
The write-up at abaj.ai — How I passed the AWS Solutions Architect in 2 weeks and the open-source study agent that produced the cards, lambda-agent.