THE DESCENT: every decision fork in the AWS SAA-C03
THE DESCENT is eleven films that drill every decision fork in the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. 265 forks, ten regions, forty three minutes. Free, no signup, no course. The exam does not really test whether you know what CloudFront is. It tests whether you can tell CloudFront from Global Accelerator when both would work and one word in the question decides. That is what these drill. CC BY 4.0.
Watch the full series on YouTube: THE DESCENT, AWS SAA-C03 Decision Trees. Free, CC BY 4.0.
The AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam does not really test whether you know what CloudFront is.
It tests whether you can tell CloudFront from Global Accelerator when both would technically work, and one word in the question is the only thing that decides. It tests whether you know that Multi-AZ is availability and a Read Replica is read scale, and that swapping them is the single most expensive mistake on the paper. It tests whether, when the stem says "static IP", you can hear the ALB die.
That is not a facts problem. You can know every service and still miss those.
So this is eleven films that drill exactly that.
What is in it
Ten regions of the AWS kingdom, one film each, plus a capstone that asks for the whole thing back at once.
01 FIND, the Global Sky. Route 53 and all nine routing policies. CloudFront, signed URLs, signed cookies, OAC, origin groups, Functions and Lambda@Edge. Global Accelerator. Transfer Acceleration and Snow.
02 ENTER, the Hybrid Frontier. Site-to-Site VPN, Direct Connect, VPN over DX, the three VIF types. DataSync, Storage Gateway and its three flavours. DMS, SCT, MGN. The Snow family by size. Outposts.
03 PROVE, the Identity Castle. IAM roles, Identity Center, both Cognito pools, cross-account and STS, Organizations and SCPs. The IAM evaluation funnel in order. Secrets Manager against Parameter Store. The whole key custody ladder from SSE-S3 to CloudHSM.
04 TRAVEL, the Network Onion. Subnets and gateways, NAT against endpoints, Security Groups against NACLs, WAF and Network Firewall, PrivateLink, Peering, Transit Gateway, Flow Logs and Session Manager.
05 ACT, Compute City. The abstraction ladder from EC2 to Batch. The ECS decision. Every load balancer. All four scaling policies. The Lambda dials. The two ECS roles that everybody confuses.
06 COORDINATE, the Integration River. SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, Kinesis, API Gateway. Queue, fan out, route, remember, stream. Five verbs, and picking the wrong one stalls the system.
07 STORE, Data Country. Ten shapes of truth and ten homes. Every S3 class. The whole FSx family. RDS against Aurora, every HA and scale construct, Aurora endpoints, DynamoDB, and the caches.
08 WATCH, the Observatory. Five questions and five watchers. CloudWatch, Logs, X-Ray, CloudTrail, Config, and the five security watchers. Systems Manager.
09 RECOVER, Recovery Mountain. The four DR strategies, chosen by two numbers. AWS Backup. Every service-specific DR cue. And the nine things that are not your data and are why the real failover fails after the drill passed.
10 PAY, the Cost Market. On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved, Spot. Storage cost. Every cost tool.
11 DESCEND. All of it. Twelve collision pairs, and a lightning round of seventy one cues.
The traps
Roughly a third of every film is spent on pairs where both answers are defensible and only the wording of the question separates them.
CloudFront against Global Accelerator. Security Group against NACL. Multi-AZ against Read Replica. Storage Gateway against DataSync. SQS against SNS against EventBridge. EventBridge against Step Functions. ALB against NLB against GWLB. API Gateway against ALB. EBS against EFS against S3. Cognito User Pool against Identity Pool. Gateway endpoint against Interface endpoint. Peering against Transit Gateway against PrivateLink.
If you are missing questions, you are probably missing them in that list.
How to use them
Put one on while you are doing something else. They are three to five minutes each.
Fair warning on what they are. These are not music videos and they are not lectures. The lines are spoken fast over a beat, close to flashcards with a pulse, and the words are on screen the whole way so nothing depends on catching it by ear.
When the screen pauses and waits, answer out loud before it moves on. There is an audible countdown, so you can do it in the car. That pause is the only part that matters. Recognising the right answer in a list and producing it from nothing are different skills, and the exam only tests one of them.
Free
No signup, no course, no upsell. CC BY 4.0, so remix it, repost it, put it in your own study playlist. Credit Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC.
If it helps you pass, that is the whole point.
License
Films: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing. Credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed.
AWS and the service names used here are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. This is independent study material and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by Amazon Web Services.