If you are a Systems Administrator or a DevOps Engineer, then this certification will test your knowledge on various technical concepts in AWS relating to Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Automation, Monitoring, and many more. Your experience in these fields will come in handy in passing the exam, but this should be complemented by actual and relevant AWS knowledge. In the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 Exam (or AWS SysOps for short), there is a combination of multi-choice/multi-response questions and a series of Exam Labs which will test your ability to perform the following:

• Deploy, manage, and operate scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant systems on AWS  
• Implement and control the flow of data to and from AWS  
• Select the appropriate AWS service based on compute, data, or security requirements  
• Identify appropriate use of AWS operational best practices  
• Estimate AWS usage costs and identify operational cost control mechanisms  
• Migrate on-premises workloads to AWS 

Given the scope of the questions and Exam Labs, you should learn the concepts of the AWS architecture, the AWS Operational Framework, as well as the AWS CLI and AWS SDK/API tools. Having prior knowledge of fundamental networking and security will also be very valuable. This article aims to provide you a straightforward guide on how to properly prepare for your upcoming AWS exam.

NOTE: As of March 28, 2023, the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam will not include exam labs until further notice. This removal of exam labs is temporary while AWS evaluates the exam labs and make improvements to provide an optimal candidate experience. With this change, the exam will consist of 65 multiple-choice questions and multiple-response questions, with an exam time of 130 minutes

All of the relevant information for your upcoming SOA-C02 exam can be found on the Official Exam Guide for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate exam. The exam guide should be your reliable source of relevant information for your upcoming SOA-C02 certification test.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 Exam Domains

The official AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 Exam Guide provides a list of exam domains, relevant topics, and services that you should focus on. There are 6 exam domains for the SOA-C02 certification test with corresponding exam coverage percentages as shown below:

• Domain 1: Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation – 20%

• Domain 2: Reliability and Business Continuity – 16%

• Domain 3: Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation – 18%

• Domain 4: Security and Compliance – 16%

• Domain 5: Networking and Content Delivery – 18%

• Domain 6: Cost and Performance Optimization – 12%

Apparently, the first domain: “Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation” has the biggest exam coverage with 20%, so you have to focus on the topics under this section. Both Domains 3 and 5 have similar percentages in the SOA-C02 exam of 18% each, as well as Domains 2 and 4 with 16% coverage. The least amount of coverage for the SOA-C02 exam would be Domain 6, which is about Cost and Performance Optimization.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 Exam Topics

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 Study Materials

The official AWS sample questions, whitepapers, AWS Documentation, AWS cheat sheets, SOA-C02 video course, and AWS practice exams will be your primary study materials for this exam. There are several whitepapers that you should read and familiarize yourself too.

By having an AWS account, you can do some hands-on labs that will help understand the different cloud concepts better. Since the exam itself contains multiple scenario questions, using the services and applying them in practice will allow you to determine the types of situations they are applied in. 

Additional details regarding your AWS SOA exam can be seen in this AWS exam blueprint.

The whitepapers listed below are arranged in such a way that you will learn the concepts first, before proceeding to application and best practices. If you need a refresh on your AWS fundamentals, go check out our guide on the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam before proceeding below.

1. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Connectivity Options – Study how you can connect different VPCs together, your VPCs to your on-premises network, and vice versa.
2. Development and Test on AWS – Study how you can leverage AWS to create development and test environments, implement pipelines and automation, and perform different validation tests for your applications.
3. Backup and Recovery Approaches on AWS – Learn which AWS services offer backup and restore features. It is also important to know how these backups are stored and secured, and select the correct storage options for them.
4. How AWS Pricing Works – Study the fundamental drivers of cost in AWS, the pricing models of commonly used services in compute, storage, and database, and how to optimize your costs. 
5. AWS Cloud Security – You should study the different security features in AWS – including infrastructure, account, network, application, and data security. Determine which aspects of security are your responsibilities, and which are AWS’.
6. AWS Security Best Practices – This whitepaper complements the previous one. Understand the security best practices and their purpose in your environment. Some services offer more than one form of security feature, such as multiple key management schemes for encryption. It is important that you can determine which form is most suitable to the given scenarios in your exam.
7. Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices – Be sure to understand the best practices in AWS since exam questions will focus their scenarios around these best practices. The whitepaper contains a number of design principles with examples for each. 
8. AWS Well-Architected Framework – This whitepaper is one of the most important papers that you should study for the SOA-C02 exam. It discusses the different pillars that make up a well-architected cloud environment. 

Optional whitepapers:

1. Overview of Deployment Options on AWS – This is an optional whitepaper that you can read to be aware of your deployment options in AWS. There is a chance that this might come up in the exam.
2. AWS Disaster Recovery Plans – As a SysOps Administrator, you should be familiar with your DR options when outages occur. Having knowledge of DR will determine how fast you can recover your infrastructure.

AWS Services to Focus On for the SOA-C02 Exam

AWS offers extensive documentation and well-written FAQs for all of its services. These two will be your primary source of information when studying. Furthermore, as an AWS SysOps Administrator, you need to be well-versed in a number of AWS products and services since you will almost always be using them in your work. I recommend checking out Tutorials Dojo’s AWS Cheat Sheets which provide a summarized but highly informative set of notes and tips for your review of these services.

Core services to study:

1. EC2 – As the most fundamental compute service offered by AWS, you should know about EC2 inside out.
2. Elastic Load Balancer – Load balancing is very important for a highly available system. Study the different types of ELBs, and the features each of them supports.
3. Auto Scaling – Study what services in AWS can be auto-scaled, what triggers scaling, and how auto scaling increases/decreases the number of instances.
4. Elastic Block Store – As the primary storage solution of EC2, study the types of EBS volumes available. Also study how to secure, backup, and restore EBS volumes.
5. S3 / Glacier – Study the S3 storage types and what differs between them. Also review the capabilities of S3 such as hosting a static website, securing access to objects using policies, lifecycle policies, etc. Learn as much about S3 as you can.
6. VPC – Study every service that is used to create a VPC (subnets, route tables, internet gateways, nat gateways, VPN gateways, etc). Also, review the differences between network access control lists and security groups, and during which situations they are applied.
7. Route 53 – Study the different types of records in Route 53. Also, study the different routing policies. Know what hosted zones and domains are.
8. RDS – Know how each RDS database differs from one another, and how they are different from Aurora. Determine what makes Aurora unique, and when it should be preferred to other databases (in terms of function, speed, cost, etc). Learn about parameter groups, option groups, and subnet groups.
9. DynamoDB – Consider how DynamoDB compares to RDS, Elasticache, and Redshift. This service is also commonly used for serverless applications along with Lambda.
10. Elasticache – Familiarize yourself with Elasticache redis and its functions. Determine the areas/services where you can place a caching mechanism to improve data throughput, such as managing the session state of an ELB, optimizing RDS instances, etc.
11. SQS – Gather info on why SQS is helpful in decoupling systems. Study how messages in the queues are being managed (standard queues, FIFO queues, dead letter queues). Know the differences between SQS, SNS, SES, and Amazon MQ.
12. SNS – Study the function of SNS and what services can be integrated with it. Also, be familiar with the supported recipients of SNS notifications.
13. IAM – Services such as IAM Users, Groups, Policies, and Roles are the most important to learn. Study how IAM integrates with other services and how it secures your application through different policies. Also, read on the best practices when using IAM.
14. CloudWatch – Study how monitoring is done in AWS and what types of metrics are sent to CloudWatch. Also read upon CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Alarms, and the custom metrics made available with CloudWatch Agent.
15. CloudTrail – Familiarize yourself with how CloudTrail works, and what kinds of logs it stores as compared to CloudWatch Logs.
16. Config – Be familiar with the situations where AWS Config is useful.
17. CloudFormation – Study how CloudFormation is used to automate infrastructure deployment. Learn the basic makeup of a CloudFormation template, stack, and stack set.
18. KMS – Familiarize how KMS integrates with other services in storing encryption keys.
19. Secrets Manager –  Understand how Secrets Manager stores secrets and how you can use them with other AWS services.
20. Parameter Store – Know when to use Parameter store and how compute services like EC2, ECS, and Lambda utilize it. 
21. DataSync – Familiarize which AWS services can be used to migrate data from an on-premises data center.

Some Additional Services We Recommend to Review for SOA-C02: 

1. Trusted Advisor
2. Systems Manager
3. CloudFront
4. Cost and Billing Management Console
5. OpsWorks
6. Direct Connect

For the exam version (SOA-C02), you should also know the following services:

1. Amazon FSx
2. AWS Backup

3. EC2 Image Builder
4. S3 Transfer Acceleration
5. AWS Global Accelerator
6. RDS Proxy
7. IAM Access Analyzer

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 Exam Labs

Note: AWS has temporarily removed the exam labs section until further notice.

The SOA-CO2 includes an exam labs section where you have to perform SysOps related tasks on the AWS Management Console. To prepare for this, make sure to play around with the different AWS services covered in the exam. You don’t need to memorize all the configurations for each service. But you have to be really good at navigating the AWS Management Console to understand where you can configure the requirements in each exam lab. Focus on preparing for exam labs on setting up a VPC, CloudWatch, Load Balancer, Auto Scaling, CloudFormation, and S3.

View our sample exam lab here.

Here is a sample exam lab video walkthrough:

Common Exam Scenarios for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 Exam

Validate Your SOA-C02 Knowledge

Once you have finished your review and you are more than confident in your knowledge, test yourself with some practice exams available online. AWS offers a practice exam that you can try out at their AWS SkillBuilder portal. Tutorials Dojo also offers a top-notch set of AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate practice tests. Each test contains unique questions that will surely help verify if you have missed out on anything important that might appear on your exam. You can also pair our practice exams with our AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Exam Study Guide eBook and video courses to further help in your exam preparations.

Sample Practice Questions For SOA-C02 Exam:

Question 1

A financial start-up has recently adopted a hybrid cloud infrastructure with AWS Cloud. They are planning to migrate their online payments system that supports an IPv6 address and uses an Oracle database in a RAC configuration. As the AWS Consultant, you have to make sure that the application can initiate outgoing traffic to the Internet but blocks any incoming connection from the Internet.

Which of the following options would you do to properly migrate the application to AWS?

1. Migrate the Oracle database to an EC2 instance. Launch an EC2 instance to host the application and then set up a NAT Instance.
2. Migrate the Oracle database to RDS. Launch an EC2 instance to host the application and then set up a NAT gateway instead of a NAT instance for better availability and higher bandwidth.
3. Migrate the Oracle database to RDS. Launch the application on a separate EC2 instance and then set up a NAT Instance.
4. Migrate the Oracle database to an EC2 instance. Launch the application on a separate EC2 instance and then set up an egress-only Internet gateway.

Question 2

Option 1:

1. Associate an IPv6 Gateway with your VPC and Subnets

2. Update the Route Tables and Security Group Rules

3. Enable Enhanced Networking in your EC2 instance

4. Assign IPv6 Addresses to the EC2 Instance

Option 2:

1. Attach an Egress-Only Internet Gateway to the VPC and Subnets

2. Update the Route Tables

3. Update the Security Group Rules

4. Assign IPv6 Addresses to the EC2 instance

Option 3:

1. Associate an IPv6 CIDR Block with the VPC and Subnets

2. Update the Route Tables

3. Update the Security Group Rules

4. Assign IPv6 Addresses to the EC2 Instance

Option 4:

1. Enable Enhanced Networking in your EC2 instance

2. Update the Route Tables

3. Update the Security Group Rules

4. Assign IPv6 Addresses to the EC2 Instance

Click here for more AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate practice exam questions.

Check out our other AWS practice test courses here:

Additional Training Materials: High-Quality SOA-C02 Video Courses

There are a few top-rated AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate video courses that you can check out as well, which can help in your exam preparations. The list below is constantly updated based on feedback from our students on which course/s helped them the most during their exams.

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate by Adrian Cantrill

Based on consensus, any of these video courses plus our practice test course and our AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Study Guide eBook were enough to pass this tough exam.

It is best to get some rest before the day of your exam and review any notes that you have written down. If you have done well in the practice tests, go over the questions where you made a mistake and understand why so. If you are not feeling so confident after trying the practice tests, you can just reschedule your exam and take your time preparing. The AWS SOA certification is one of the most sought-after certifications in the SysOps Administration field. The exam will not be easy to pass, but it’ll be worth it when you do.