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ArchIQ — AWS Solutions Architect Study Platform

An interactive AWS Solutions Architect (SAA-C03) playbook with 118 topics, decision guides, and a grounded AI tutor that answers only from the material it can cite.

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ArchIQ — AWS Solutions Architect Study Platform interface

Overview

ArchIQ is an interactive study platform for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam (SAA-C03). It covers the four Well-Architected domains across 118 topics, with decision guides, service comparisons, and scenario questions built to train architectural reasoning rather than flash-card recall. It also ships an AI tutor, Ask ArchIQ, that answers only from the material it can cite.

I built it while preparing for the exam myself. Writing the material down is how I know I actually understand it, and turning it into a public artifact made the knowledge sharper.

Business problem

The exam does not reward memorizing service names. It rewards choosing between SQS, SNS, and EventBridge for a given scenario, or knowing when RDS Multi-AZ is the answer and when you actually need read replicas. Passive study material does not build that skill, and a general-purpose chatbot will happily invent a confident, wrong answer about an AWS service.

What it does

  • Four domains, structured. Secure, Resilient, High-Performing, and Cost-Optimized, with progress tracking so you can see your weakest area.
  • Decision guides. Side-by-side reasoning for the comparisons the exam loves: SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge, RDS Multi-AZ vs read replicas, ALB vs NLB vs GWLB, EC2 vs Lambda vs Fargate.
  • Scenario questions and exam traps. Practice that mirrors how the exam actually phrases its trade-offs.
  • Ask ArchIQ. A grounded AI tutor that uses a page-anchored RAG pattern with adjustable answer depth, so its answers stay tied to the topic you are on.

Architecture

ArchIQ is a fully serverless AWS site, and it doubles as a working example of the exact patterns it teaches.

  • Built with Vite, React, and TypeScript, with 175+ typed content modules and Mermaid architecture diagrams.
  • Hosted on private S3 behind CloudFront with Origin Access Control, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, Route 53, and an ACM certificate.
  • Ask ArchIQ runs on a Node.js Lambda behind API Gateway, calling Amazon Bedrock with a page-grounded RAG pattern and hardened prompt-injection defenses, with DynamoDB-backed rate limiting.
  • Infrastructure as code with CloudFormation, least-privilege IAM, a shared-secret origin check, GitHub Actions CI/CD over OIDC, and an AWS Budgets alarm to cap Bedrock spend.

Important design decisions

  • Grounded tutor, not a chatbot. Ask ArchIQ answers from the page content, with untrusted context isolated and strict scope enforcement, so it does not drift into invented AWS behavior.
  • Cost caps built in. A Budgets alarm on Bedrock spend and DynamoDB rate limiting keep a public AI feature from turning into a surprise bill.
  • The site practices what it teaches. The hosting and security choices are the same Well-Architected patterns the content walks through.

Lessons learned

  • Teaching a topic is the most demanding way to learn it. Turning exam prep into a grounded tutor forced me to make the reasoning explicit.
  • Hardening a public AI endpoint, against prompt injection and against cost, is most of the real engineering. The model call is the easy part.