In partnership with
Last week I told you SAP-C03 registration was about to open. AWS followed through on October 27 with a post covering both updated exams, the Developer Associate (DVA-C03) and the Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C03). The exam guides came with it, including side-by-side comparisons against the old versions. I read both so you don't have to.
The dates
SAP-C02 has its last sitting on November 16, which is 14 days from today. SAP-C03 starts November 17, per AWS's September announcement.
DVA-C02 runs through November 30. The DVA-C03 exam guide says registration for the new version opens December 1, while the blog post's wording sounds like it's open now. I'd trust the guide, and check the booking page before you plan around it.
SAP-C03
The exam has 65 scored questions plus 10 unscored ones, and the passing score is 720. The guide now lists 5 domains instead of 4, weighted 25, 25, 15, 15 and 20%. Cost gets its own domain at 15%.
The comparison page is where it gets interesting. New content includes Bedrock AgentCore, RAG with Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Bedrock Guardrails, post-quantum cryptography with ML-KEM and ML-DSA, VPC Lattice, multi-tenant isolation patterns and IPv6 dual-stack migration.
The in-scope service list got a haircut. Every AWS IoT service is gone, along with WorkSpaces, AppStream, Service Catalog, Batch, App Runner and Amplify. Comprehend, Lex, Textract and the other individual AI services got folded into Bedrock and SageMaker AI as parent entries.
AWS says the cuts don't mean those concepts can never show up. I'd still spend my study hours elsewhere.
Nobody's coming to approve your idea
People assume that real businesses get built by other people with more resources. It's how great ideas get stuck in notes apps and conversations.
But you don't need six months and a developer's salary to validate your concept. You just need a weekend. Describe what you want to exist and Lovable builds it: a real site, a real product, ready to accept real payments from real customers. Not a mockup to show people. An actual thing they can use.
You don't need anyone's sign-off to get started. Take $5 off your first month.
Discount of $5 applies to first month of any paid plan. You need to sign up via this webpage in order to claim the discount. The discount applies to new and returning users without an active paid plan. Terms apply.
DVA-C03
This one has 50 scored questions and 15 unscored, with the same 720 passing score. Weights are 30% development, 26% security, 22% testing and deployment, and 22% troubleshooting and performance tuning. That last one went up from 18%, so expect more debugging scenarios than before.
The big addition is a new task on securing AI service usage. It covers VPC endpoints so your data stays out of model training, prompt injection protection, tool-use authorization for agents and human approval for sensitive actions. Containers also get real attention now, with ECR, ECS, EKS and Fargate all listed, and AI tooling shows up in the testing and CI/CD tasks too (generating tests, analyzing errors).
Picking foundation models, writing prompts and designing RAG are explicitly out of scope. You're expected to use and secure AI services as a developer, and that's about it. AWS also squashed 4 separate DynamoDB skills into 1, and says that doesn't mean less DynamoDB.
What to do
Sitting SAP-C02? You have until November 16. If your prep is mostly done, book now. If not, SAP-C03 is a fine target, but you'll need the Bedrock and multi-tenant material.
Studying for the Developer Associate? You've got until November 30 on the old exam. Compare the two guides before deciding, because the AI security task changes what you'd study.
Neither? Skim the SAP-C03 additions list anyway. It's a decent map of what AWS thinks architects need in 2026.
Keep Learning and Building.
If you're studying for Azure or AWS right now, Learn Cloud Academy makes two apps for exactly that. Learn Azure and Learn AWS each have 2,000+ practice questions, and every question links to the official documentation behind it. Miss one and you can read the real answer on the spot. Both are on iOS and Android, and more than 100,000 people have used them.
If you'd rather study in a browser, the same material is on learncloudacademy.com with Google Cloud added, and one price covers all 3 platforms.
If someone forwarded you this, the button below gets it in your inbox every Monday.