Professional Architect on AWS

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional Master enterprise-scale cloud architecture on the world's most widely adopted cloud platform

You've learned how to design cloud solutions. Now it's time to lead them.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate certification proves you can design secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud architectures. But as organisations grow more complex, their cloud environments grow with them — spanning multiple accounts, multiple regions, hybrid infrastructure, legacy systems, and increasingly demanding requirements around security, cost, and resilience.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional is where you learn to handle all of that. It is the certification that separates cloud architects who can design a solution from those who can design the right solution — at enterprise scale, under real constraints, with the full weight of business strategy behind every decision.

What this course is about

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional is one of the most respected and challenging certifications in the entire cloud industry. It builds directly on the Associate foundation and takes your architectural thinking to a significantly higher level — covering the complex, multi-layered scenarios that senior architects encounter in real enterprise environments every day.

This is not a course about learning new AWS services from scratch. It is a course about developing the depth of judgment, the breadth of knowledge, and the architectural confidence to make complex decisions under pressure — and to justify those decisions clearly to technical teams and business stakeholders alike.

Every module in this programme is aligned with the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional exam (SAP-C02) and built around the kind of scenario-based, multi-constraint problems that define both the exam and the real world of senior cloud architecture.

What sets the Professional certification apart

Where the Associate certification tests your ability to design correct solutions, the Professional certification tests your ability to design the best solution — given a specific set of business requirements, technical constraints, cost considerations, and operational realities.

Questions at this level are longer, more complex, and deliberately ambiguous. Multiple answers may be technically correct — the exam tests whether you can identify the most appropriate one given everything the scenario requires. This demands not just knowledge of AWS services, but a deep understanding of when to use them, when not to use them, and how they interact across complex, real-world architectures.

This programme prepares you for exactly that standard of thinking.

What you will learn

• How to design and evaluate complex, multi-tier cloud architectures that meet demanding enterprise requirements across security, performance, reliability, and cost
• How to architect solutions that span multiple AWS accounts, multiple regions, and hybrid on-premises environments
• How to migrate complex legacy workloads to AWS — assessing, planning, and executing migrations with minimal disruption and maximum business continuity
• How to design for operational excellence at scale — automating infrastructure management, enforcing governance, and maintaining visibility across large, distributed environments
• How to optimise costs across complex AWS environments — identifying waste, right-sizing resources, and building financial governance into architectural decisions
• How to design highly secure architectures that meet enterprise compliance requirements across data protection, identity management, and network security
• How to evaluate competing architectural options and make well-reasoned trade-offs between cost, complexity, performance, and resilience
• How to approach and pass the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional exam (SAP-C02) with the knowledge and confidence the exam demands

Who this is for

This course is designed for experienced cloud professionals who are ready to take their architectural skills to the highest level. It is particularly well suited to:

AWS Solutions Architects — Associate certified professionals If you hold the Associate certification and are ready to go deeper, this is the natural and most direct next step. The Professional programme builds directly on what you already know — extending your capabilities into the complex, enterprise-scale scenarios that senior roles demand.

Senior cloud engineers and platform architects If you are already working with complex AWS environments and want to formalise your expertise with the industry's most respected senior-level certification, this programme provides the structured depth and exam preparation to do that effectively.

Cloud consultants and technical leads If you advise organisations on cloud strategy, lead architectural decisions, or manage technical teams working on AWS, the Professional certification validates the seniority of your expertise and strengthens your credibility with clients and stakeholders.

IT architects transitioning to cloud If you have a strong background in enterprise architecture — on-premises infrastructure, network design, or systems integration — and want to apply that experience at senior level in the cloud, this programme bridges that gap with the depth and rigour the role requires.

Recommended prior experience: Holding the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate certification, or having equivalent hands-on experience designing and implementing AWS solutions, is strongly recommended before starting this programme. Candidates should be comfortable with core AWS services and fundamental architectural concepts before moving into the Professional level content. If you are unsure whether you are ready, speak to one of our advisers — we will give you an honest assessment.

How you will learn it

The Professional certification is not passed by memorising services — it is passed by developing architectural judgment. This programme is built around scenario-based learning, complex case studies, and hands-on practice that reflects the kind of multi-constraint problems the exam presents and the real world demands.

Every session is delivered by an active industry professional with hands-on experience designing and managing enterprise AWS environments. You will have access to expert support before, during, and after every session — working through complex scenarios, challenging assumptions, and building the depth of thinking that the Professional level requires.

Flexible delivery — designed around your life

We offer multiple training formats so you can learn in the way that works best for you:

One-to-one (1:1) Private, personalised sessions scheduled around your availability. 

Group training (cohort) Prefer to work through complex scenarios alongside other experienced professionals? Our weekend cohort sessions bring motivated practitioners together in a structured, collaborative environment — ideal for working through the kind of multi-layered problems that benefit from discussion and different perspectives.

What's included

• Personalised AWS Solutions Architect — Professional training plan
• Full exam preparation and scenario-based technique coaching
• Complex architectural case studies and hands-on labs throughout
• Access to an expert trainer before, during, and after every session
• Guidance on study materials and additional resources

Your outcome

You will complete this programme with the architectural depth to design and evaluate enterprise-scale AWS solutions with confidence, a globally recognised professional-level certification that positions you among the most qualified cloud architects in the industry, and the scenario-based judgment that separates senior architects from the rest.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional is not just a credential. It is a signal to every employer, client, and colleague that you operate at the highest level of your field.

Already hold the Associate certification and ready to take the next step? Or want to understand whether you are ready to start? Speak to one of our advisers — no commitment, no pressure, just an honest conversation about where you are now and the best way to get to where you want to be.

Course curriculum

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional 

Designing solutions for organisational complexity

Enterprise organisations don't just have complex technology — they have complex structures. Multiple accounts, multiple teams, multiple regions, and competing priorities all need to be managed through architecture that holds together under real-world pressure. This module develops the skills to design at that level of organisational scale.

Architecting network connectivity strategies

You will build a deep understanding of AWS networking at enterprise scale — evaluating connectivity options across multiple VPCs, designing hybrid connectivity between on-premises environments and AWS, and selecting the right regions and availability zones based on latency and compliance requirements. The module covers AWS Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN, PrivateLink, and Route 53 Resolver for hybrid DNS scenarios, alongside network segmentation, IP addressing strategies, and traffic monitoring across complex, multi-account environments.

Prescribing security controls

At the Professional level, security is not a checklist — it is an architectural discipline. You will learn how to design cross-account access management strategies using IAM and AWS IAM Identity Center, integrate with third-party identity providers, deploy encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit using AWS KMS and ACM, and develop centralised security event notification and auditing frameworks using AWS CloudTrail, Security Hub, and Amazon Inspector.

Designing reliable and resilient architectures

You will work through the full spectrum of disaster recovery strategies — from backup and restore through to pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site active/active deployments — selecting and configuring the right approach based on Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). The module covers AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, automated failure recovery architectures, scale-up and scale-out design patterns, and effective backup and restoration strategies at enterprise scale.

Designing a multi-account AWS environment

Managing a single AWS account is straightforward. Managing dozens of them across a large organisation requires a different level of architectural thinking. This section covers AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower in depth — evaluating account structures for different organisational requirements, developing multi-account governance models, designing centralised logging strategies, and managing resource sharing and cross-account event notifications across complex enterprise environments.

Determining cost optimisation and visibility strategies

Cost at enterprise scale requires architectural decisions, not just monitoring. You will learn how to use AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Trusted Advisor, and AWS Compute Optimizer to monitor and analyse spend, develop effective tagging strategies that map costs to business units, and make informed purchasing decisions across on-demand, reserved, savings plan, and spot pricing models to optimise cost without compromising performance or resilience.

Designing for new solutions

When an organisation needs something new built, the Professional architect is the person who determines how it should be built — balancing business requirements, technical constraints, security obligations, performance targets, and cost in a single coherent design. This module develops the judgment to do that at the highest level.

Designing deployment strategies that meet business requirements

You will learn how to select and design deployment strategies for new services and features — evaluating Infrastructure as Code approaches using AWS CloudFormation, designing CI/CD pipelines for reliable and repeatable delivery, and implementing rollback mechanisms that protect business continuity during deployments. The module covers blue/green, canary, and rolling deployment patterns, change management processes, and AWS Systems Manager for configuration management automation at scale.

Designing for business continuity

New solutions must be designed to survive failure from the outset. You will architect multi-region and multi-AZ solutions that provide application and infrastructure availability in the event of disruption — configuring disaster recovery solutions, designing automated backup strategies that are cost-effective and cross-regional, setting up data and database replication, and implementing centralised monitoring that enables proactive recovery from system failures before they become outages.

Determining security controls for new architectures

Security requirements must be embedded into new solutions from the design stage, not retrofitted afterward. This section covers specifying IAM users and roles that adhere to least privilege, designing network security using security groups and network ACLs, developing encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit, implementing AWS managed security services including Shield, WAF, GuardDuty, and Security Hub, and developing patch management strategies that keep new environments compliant with organisational standards.

Designing for reliability

You will design highly available application environments based on demanding business requirements — implementing loosely coupled architectures using Amazon SQS, SNS, and AWS Step Functions, configuring multi-AZ and multi-region deployments, designing auto scaling policies that respond dynamically to load, implementing advanced DNS routing policies with Route 53, and operating and maintaining high-availability architectures including application and database failover at enterprise scale.

Designing to meet performance objectives

Performance at scale requires deliberate architectural choices. You will learn how to design large-scale application architectures for varied access patterns, select purpose-built databases for specific workloads, apply caching, buffering, and replica patterns to meet performance targets, design elastic architectures that scale efficiently with demand, and develop rightsizing strategies that keep performance aligned with cost across the lifetime of a solution.

Determining cost optimisation strategies for new solutions

Every new solution carries a cost profile that must be designed in from the start. You will learn how to identify and select the most cost-effective infrastructure for each workload, choose appropriate pricing models, model data transfer costs and select services that minimise them, and develop controls for expenditure and usage awareness that keep new solutions financially sustainable as they scale.

Continuous improvement for existing solutions

Building new solutions is only part of the architect's role. The Professional architect is equally responsible for evaluating what already exists — identifying weaknesses, improving reliability, tightening security, and ensuring that existing environments evolve alongside the business that depends on them.

Improving operational excellence

You will learn how to evaluate existing deployment processes and identify improvement opportunities — recommending the right logging and monitoring strategy using Amazon CloudWatch, prioritising automation opportunities within existing solution stacks, recommending AWS Systems Manager for configuration management automation, and engineering failure scenario activities that test and validate recovery processes before they are needed in production.

Improving security in existing environments

Security in existing environments is as much about auditing and remediating as it is about designing. This section covers evaluating secrets and credentials management strategies using AWS Secrets Manager and Systems Manager Parameter Store, auditing environments for least privilege access, reviewing solutions for security at every layer, ensuring comprehensive traceability of users and services through CloudTrail and AWS Config, designing and implementing patch and backup processes, and automating responses to detected vulnerabilities.

Improving performance

You will learn how to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in existing architectures — translating business requirements into measurable metrics and KPIs, testing remediation solutions and making evidence-based recommendations, assessing rightsizing opportunities, and evaluating when to adopt new AWS managed services and global service offerings such as AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront to improve performance at reduced operational overhead.

Improving reliability

Existing architectures accumulate reliability risks over time — single points of failure, inadequate replication, insufficient scaling headroom. This section covers evaluating existing architectures to identify areas that fall short of reliability requirements, remediating single points of failure, enabling data replication and self-healing capabilities, understanding application growth and usage trends, and applying scaling methodologies including load balancing and auto scaling to improve resilience across existing environments.

Identifying cost optimisation opportunities

Existing environments often accumulate waste — underutilised resources, suboptimal purchasing models, untagged spend, and inefficient data transfer patterns. You will learn how to analyse usage reports to identify overutilised and underutilised resources, use AWS Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer to surface savings opportunities, investigate AWS Cost and Usage Reports at granular level, design billing alarms based on usage patterns, and implement tagging strategies for accurate cost allocation and reporting.

Accelerating workload migration and modernisation

One of the most strategically important responsibilities of a Professional architect is guiding organisations through the migration of existing workloads to AWS — and identifying opportunities to modernise those workloads in the process. This module covers the full migration lifecycle from initial assessment through to modernisation and enhancement.

Selecting workloads for migration

Not every workload should be migrated in the same way — or at the same time. You will learn how to complete application migration assessments using AWS Migration Hub, evaluate workloads against the seven common migration strategies (the 7Rs: retire, retain, rehost, relocate, repurchase, replatform, and refactor), assess total cost of ownership to build the business case for migration, and develop wave planning approaches that sequence workloads for migration in the right order.

Determining the optimal migration approach

Once workloads are selected, the right migration approach must be chosen for each one. This section covers selecting the appropriate data transfer service from AWS DataSync, AWS Transfer Family, AWS Snow Family, and S3 Transfer Acceleration based on data volume, connectivity, and time constraints. It also covers application migration using AWS Application Discovery Service and AWS Application Migration Service, database migration using AWS DMS and AWS Schema Conversion Tool, identity migration using IAM Identity Center and AWS Directory Service, and governance during migration using AWS Control Tower and AWS Organizations.

Designing new architectures for migrated workloads

Migration is not just a lift-and-shift exercise — it is an opportunity to redesign workloads for the cloud. You will learn how to select the appropriate compute platform from EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, and serverless options, choose the right container hosting platform from ECS, EKS, and Fargate, select the optimal storage service from EBS, EFS, FSx, S3, and Storage Gateway, and choose the right database platform from Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, and OpenSearch Service based on the specific requirements of each workload.

Identifying modernisation and enhancement opportunities

The final step in any migration is asking whether the migrated workload can be improved. This section covers identifying opportunities to decouple application components for greater resilience and scalability, recognising where serverless solutions using AWS Lambda and Fargate can replace traditional server-based architectures, selecting purpose-built databases including DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, and ElastiCache where they offer advantages over general-purpose alternatives, and choosing the right application integration service from Amazon SQS, SNS, EventBridge, and Step Functions to build more loosely coupled, event-driven architectures.

This programme is fully aligned with the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional certification. 

Every module, lab, and practical exercise is designed not only to build real-world cloud architecture skills, but to ensure you have exactly the knowledge and confidence needed to sit and pass this globally recognised certification.

AWS Certified Architect Professional exam (SAP-C02)

Where this course can take you

Completing your AWS Architect Professional training is a significant milestone — and a genuine foundation for some of the most exciting and well-compensated specialisations in the technology industry. Whether you want to go deeper into AWS, move into a high-demand specialism, or broaden your expertise across platforms, there are clear and rewarding paths forward from here.

Earn your AWS certification

The natural first step after completing your training is sitting the official AWS Certified Architect Professional exam (SAP-C02). We prepare you thoroughly — not just on the content, but on exam technique and time management — so that when you book your seat, you're ready to perform with confidence.

Advance to AWS DevOps Engineer — Professional

Ready to go beyond infrastructure management? The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional certification takes your operational skills into more advanced territory — bridging the gap between development and operations at enterprise scale.

You will go deeper into source control with Git, containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes, advanced infrastructure provisioning with Terraform, and the automation of complex, multi-environment deployment pipelines. This certification is widely regarded as one of the most valuable credentials you can hold for working with modern engineering teams — and it opens doors into some of the highest-paying roles in the industry.

Specialise in cloud security (SecOps)

Everything built in the cloud can be made to work. The harder question — and the one every organisation is asking — is how secure it actually is.

If you want to be the person who answers that question, our AWS Certified Security Specialty path is the right next step. You will develop deep expertise in protecting cloud workloads, managing data securely, implementing compliance controls, and responding to security incidents — all aligned with AWS best practices and real-world enterprise requirements.

Security skills are in critical demand. Organisations of every size are actively hiring professionals who can design and operate secure cloud environments, and this specialism consistently commands some of the strongest salaries in the field.

Move into Data or Machine learning

Two of the fastest-growing and highest-paying areas in technology sit at the intersection of cloud and data. If working with data interests you, our AWS Data Engineer and AWS Machine Learning Engineer programmes offer a natural and well-structured next step — building on your existing AWS knowledge to open doors into roles that are shaping the future of the industry.

Expand beyond AWS

AWS is the dominant cloud platform, but today's most versatile professionals understand more than one provider. Our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) training and certification programmes give you the breadth to work across cloud environments — making you a stronger candidate and a more adaptable professional as the industry continues to evolve.

Not sure which direction is right for you?

That's completely normal at this stage. Our advisers work with students every day to help them map out learning paths that match their goals, their current experience, and the kind of career they're building toward. It's a free, no-pressure conversation — and it could save you a significant amount of time choosing the wrong next step.

Get in touch and let's figure it out together.