Candidates for the Amazon Web Services Solution Architect–Associate certification exam have one or more years of hands-on experience designing available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS. Amazon recommends candidates have an in-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language, ability to identify and define requirements for an AWS-based application, experience with deploying hybrid systems with on-premises and AWS components, and capability to provide best practices for building secure and reliable applications on the AWS platform.