AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Exam Study Path

If you are a Systems Administrator or a DevOps Engineer, then this certification will test your knowledge on these areas in AWS. Your experience in these fields will come in handy in passing the exam, but this should be complemented by actual AWS SysOps knowledge. In the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Exam (or AWS SOA for short), the questions including the exam labs 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 guide aims to provide you a straightforward guide when reviewing for this exam.

Study Materials

The FREE AWS Exam Readiness video course, official AWS sample questions, whitepapers, AWS Documentation, AWS cheat sheets, and AWS practice exams will be your primary study materials for this exam. There are multiple papers that you should read and familiarize yourself with as a SysOps Administrator.

Having an AWS account you can use will help ingest the different concepts within these whitepapers. Since the exam itself contains multiple scenario questions, using the services and applying them in practice yourself 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 Using AWS – Learn which AWS services offer backup and restore features. It is also important to know how these backups are stored and secured, and selecting 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. Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes – 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. 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.

Also check out this article: Top 5 FREE AWS Review Materials.

AWS Services to Focus On

AWS offers extensive documentation and well-written FAQs for all of their 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 provides a summarized but highly informative set of notes and tips for your review on 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 are 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. Study also 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 from 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:

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

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

1. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre
2. AWS Backup
3. EC2 Image Builder
4. S3 Transfer Acceleration
5. AWS Global Accelerator
6. RDS Proxy
7. IAM Access Analyzer

Exam Labs

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

Validate Your Knowledge

Once you have finished your review and you are more than confident of your knowledge, test yourself with some practice exams available online. AWS offers a practice exam that you can try out at their aws.training 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 to further help in your exam preparations.

Sample Practice Test Questions:

Question 1

A company is heavily using AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the deployment of their cloud resources. The SysOps Administrator needs to write a template that will automatically copy objects from an existing S3 bucket into the new one.

Which of the following is the most suitable configuration for this scenario?

1. Set up an AWS Lambda function and configure it to perform the copy operation. Integrate the Lambda function to the CloudFormation template as a custom resource.
2. Configure the CloudFormation template to modify the existing S3 bucket to allow cross-origin requests.
3. Set up the CloudFormation template to use the AWS Data Pipeline CopyActivity object to copy the files from the existing S3 bucket to the new S3 bucket.
4. Configure the CloudFormation template to enable cross-region replication on the existing S3 bucket and select the new S3 bucket as the destination.

Show me the answer!

Correct Answer: 1

AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to model a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, provision them quickly and consistently, and manage them throughout their lifecycles, by treating infrastructure as code. A CloudFormation template describes your desired resources and their dependencies so you can launch and configure them together as a stack. You can use a template to create, update, and delete an entire stack as a single unit, as often as you need to, instead of managing resources individually. You can manage and provision stacks across multiple AWS accounts and AWS Regions.

In an AWS CloudFormation template, you can specify a Lambda function as the target of a custom resource. Use custom resources to process parameters, retrieve configuration values, or call other AWS services during stack lifecycle events. When you associate a Lambda function with a custom resource, the function is invoked whenever the custom resource is created, updated, or deleted. AWS CloudFormation calls a Lambda API to invoke the function and to pass all the request data (such as the request type and resource properties) to the function. The power and customizability of Lambda functions in combination with AWS CloudFormation enable a wide range of scenarios, such as dynamically looking up AMI IDs during stack creation, or implementing and using utility functions, such as string reversal functions.

The requirement for this scenario is to copy all the objects from an existing S3 bucket to a new S3 bucket created by the CloudFormation template. To accomplish this requirement, you need to create a custom Lambda function that can copy the objects from the source bucket to the new S3 bucket. You can also define the options you want Amazon S3 to apply during replication, such as server-side encryption, replica ownership, and transitioning replicas to another storage class.

Hence, the correct answer is: Set up an AWS Lambda function and configure it to perform the copy operation. Integrate the Lambda function to the Cloudformation template as a custom resource.

The option that says: Configure the Cloudformation template to enable cross-region replication on the existing S3 bucket and select the new S3 bucket as the destination is incorrect because this option won’t be able to copy the existing objects to the new S3 bucket. For this configuration, you need to invoke Lambda first to copy the objects in the S3 bucket.

The option that says: Set up the CloudFormation template to CopyActivity object to copy the files from the existing S3 bucket to the new S3 bucket is incorrect because CopyActivity does not support copying multipart Amazon S3 files. The most suitable configuration to copy the objects from an existing bucket to a new S3 bucket is to use a custom Lambda resource in CloudFormation.

The option that says: Configure the CloudFormation template to modify the S3 bucket to allow cross-origin requests is incorrect because the scenario did not state anything about allowing cross-origin access to your Amazon S3 resources. Also, this option does not have the capability to copy all the objects from an existing S3 bucket to a new S3 bucket.

References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/template-custom-resources-lambda.html
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/infrastructure-and-automation/deploying-aws-lambda-functions-using-aws-cloudformation-the-portable-way/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/use-aws-cloudformation-to-automate-the-creation-of-an-s3-bucket-with-cross-region-replication-enabled/

Check out this AWS CloudFormation Cheat Sheet:
https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cloudformation/

Question 2

1. Build a Lambda function using the CreateImage API that will take an AMI of the EC2 instance configured with no-reboot parameter. Then, create a rule to invoke the Lambda function daily on Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events).
2. Using the CreateImage API, build a Lambda function that will take an AMI of the EC2 instance and include a reboot parameter. Then, create a rule to invoke the Lambda function daily on Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events).
3. Using AWS Backup, create a backup plan that runs daily. Assign the resource ID of the instance and set the no-reboot parameter.
4. Using AWS Backup, create a backup plan that runs daily. Assign the resource ID of the instance and set the reboot parameter.

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

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Additional Training Materials: High-Quality 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
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate by A Cloud Guru

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.