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AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer · Associate badge
SOA-C03 · Free study guide

AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer · Associate

For people who run workloads on AWS: you monitor, automate, secure and troubleshoot systems in production. It replaced the SysOps Administrator certification.

Questions
65 (50 scored)
Time
130 minutes
Passing score
720 / 1000
Level
Associate

What the exam covers

Domains and key topics

Domain 122% of the exam

Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization

  • CloudWatch metrics, alarms, logs, metric filters and dashboards
  • Remediating issues automatically with EventBridge and Systems Manager
  • Performance tuning for EC2, EBS, RDS and caching
Official domain details ↗
Domain 222% of the exam

Reliability and Business Continuity

  • Scaling and elasticity with Auto Scaling and load balancers
  • High availability across Availability Zones and Regions
  • Backup and restore with AWS Backup, snapshots and versioning
Official domain details ↗
Domain 322% of the exam

Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation

  • Provisioning with CloudFormation, StackSets and AWS CDK
  • Golden images with EC2 Image Builder
  • Automating operations with Systems Manager: Run Command, Patch Manager, Automation
Official domain details ↗
Domain 416% of the exam

Security and Compliance

  • Compliance with AWS Config rules and Security Hub
  • Access control with IAM and Organizations SCPs
  • Protecting data with KMS, Secrets Manager and ACM
Official domain details ↗
Domain 518% of the exam

Networking and Content Delivery

  • VPC design: subnets, route tables, NAT, endpoints, flow logs
  • Route 53 routing policies and health checks
  • CloudFront distributions and caching
  • Troubleshooting connectivity: security groups, network ACLs, Reachability Analyzer
Official domain details ↗

Know these well

Key AWS services

Amazon CloudWatch

Metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards.

AWS Systems Manager

Patch, run commands and automate at scale.

AWS CloudFormation

Provision infrastructure as code.

EC2 Auto Scaling & ELB

Scale out and spread traffic.

AWS Backup

Central backup policies.

AWS Config

Track configuration and compliance.

Amazon EventBridge

React to events automatically.

Amazon VPC

Networking, flow logs and endpoints.

Route 53 & CloudFront

DNS and content delivery.

AWS Organizations

Accounts and guardrails.

How to prepare

A simple study plan

  1. 1Read the official exam guide once, end to end.
  2. 2Practice in a sandbox account: alarms, automation runbooks and CloudFormation stacks.
  3. 3Learn the CloudWatch features well; monitoring runs through every domain.
  4. 4Practice troubleshooting network connectivity step by step.
  5. 5Take a timed practice exam and review every explanation, right and wrong.

Always check the official SOA-C03 exam guide ↗ for the current version of the exam.

Preparing for more than one exam?

Every AWS certification has a free study guide here, from Foundational to Specialty.

All study guides →