Architect or Developer Associate?
Same tier. Same price. Different audience. Here is which one matches your work.
Exam details
| Detail | SAA-C03 (Architect) | DVA-C02 (Developer) |
|---|---|---|
| Tier | Associate | Associate |
| Question count | 65 | 65 |
| Duration | 130 min | 130 min |
| Passing score | 720 | 720 |
| Cost (USD) | $150 | $150 |
| Recommended experience | 1+ year designing on AWS | 1+ year of AWS development |
| Coding required? | Light — read CLI/SDK calls | Yes — read SDK code, IAM policies, Lambda runtimes |
| Service depth | Wider, design-oriented (VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, EC2) | Deeper on Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, SDKs |
| Career signal | Cloud / solutions architect, SRE | Backend / fullstack engineer, serverless dev |
| Typical study hours | 60–100 hours | 60–80 hours |
Where each one wins
SAA-C03 wins on…
- – Broader service coverage
- – Stronger architect / SRE signal
- – Required for SAP-C02 (Pro tier)
- – No coding background needed
- – More post-cert career paths
DVA-C02 wins on…
- – Deeper hands-on dev signal
- – Better fit for serverless work
- – Less architecture theory to absorb
- – Counts toward DOP-C02 (DevOps Pro)
- – Stronger if you ship Lambda functions
We recommend…
Do you write code that talks to AWS APIs? Take DVA-C02. The exam will reward what you do every day — Lambda runtimes, DynamoDB query patterns, IAM-policy debugging — and the explanations will feel familiar.
Do you design systems on AWS without writing the code? Take SAA-C03. The breadth is greater, the architecture vocabulary is richer, and it is the prerequisite mindset for SAP-C02.
Doing both is normal. Many engineers take SAA first (broader, easier signal), then DVA when they want to demonstrate depth. The opposite order works too — DVA, then SAA — for engineers who started serverless-first and want to round out their architecture story.