AWS SAA-C03 Service Frequency

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A frequency breakdown of AWS service mentions across SAA-C03 study material. Bars are normalized to the most-mentioned service within each category, so the longest bar in every section reads as 100%. Use the Top 10 ranking to spot exam-critical services regardless of category.

Top 10 Overall

EC2 and S3 alone dwarf everything else. The classic stack of compute, storage, networking, and IAM accounts for most of the surface area.

#1EC2478
#2S3401
#3Lambda273
#4RDS197
#5Auto Scaling168
#6VPC128
#7IAM121
#8DynamoDB112
#9CloudFront96
#10EBS85

By Category

Compute — total 1,101

EC2478
Lambda273
Auto Scaling168
ECS65
EKS41
Fargate40
Elastic Beanstalk15
Batch12
Outposts4
Lightsail3
App Runner2

Storage — total 707

S3401
EBS85
EFS66
Glacier51
FSx44
Storage Gateway35
Backup25

Networking — total 546

VPC128
CloudFront96
ELB / ALB / NLB82
API Gateway76
Route 5359
Direct Connect43
Global Accelerator27
Transit Gateway23
PrivateLink9
App Mesh3
Cloud Map0

Databases — total 493

RDS197
DynamoDB112
Aurora80
ElastiCache53
Redshift39
Neptune4
DocumentDB4
Timestream2
QLDB2
Keyspaces0
MemoryDB0

Security & IAM — total 366

IAM121
KMS69
WAF29
Secrets Manager21
ACM21
Inspector20
GuardDuty19
Cognito17
Macie15
Shield15
Security Hub6
Firewall Manager5
Network Firewall4
CloudHSM3
Detective1

Management — total 316

CloudWatch84
Organizations50
Systems Manager49
CloudTrail34
Config27
CloudFormation23
Trusted Advisor11
Cost Explorer10
RAM8
Control Tower7
Service Catalog7
Compute Optimizer6
OpsWorks0
License Manager0

Messaging — total 245

SQS80
EventBridge67
SNS62
Step Functions17
SES8
AppFlow5
MQ3
AppSync3

Analytics — total 202

Kinesis48
Athena42
Glue38
EMR29
QuickSight17
OpenSearch14
Lake Formation8
MSK3
Data Pipeline3

Migration — total 113

DataSync43
DMS38
Snow Family27
Migration Hub2
SMS2
MGN1

ML & AI — total 46

SageMaker9
Comprehend8
Forecast8
Rekognition6
Textract5
Transcribe4
Lex2
Polly2
Translate2
Bedrock0
Personalize0

Developer Tools — total 3

X-Ray3
CodePipeline0
CDK0
CodeBuild0
CodeCommit0
CodeDeploy0
CodeArtifact0
Cloud90

IoT — total 0

IoT Core0
Greengrass0
SiteWise0
TwinMaker0

Takeaways

  • Compute and Storage carry the exam. EC2 (478) and S3 (401) together account for over a third of all service mentions; combined with Lambda, RDS, Auto Scaling, VPC, IAM, DynamoDB, CloudFront, and EBS, the Top 10 alone covers the majority.
  • Categories worth a deeper read: Networking and Databases are well-distributed — multiple services within each category appear frequently, so don't stop at the leader.
  • Categories you can skim: Developer Tools (only X-Ray shows up), IoT (zero), and most of ML & AI rarely appear. Spend minimal time here.
  • Watch for zeros. Bedrock, Personalize, Keyspaces, MemoryDB, OpsWorks, License Manager, and the entire CodeStar suite are essentially absent — recognize them by name but don't memorize their details.