AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate Practise Exam

Who it is for

• CloudOps engineers preparing for the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate Certification (SOA-C03).
• Practitioners who need practice deploying, managing, and operating workloads on AWS.

What this exam covers

• Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization — 22%
• Reliability and Business Continuity — 22%
• Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation — 22%
• Security and Compliance — 16%
• Networking and Content Delivery — 18%

What you will practice

• Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms, dashboards, and the CloudWatch agent, remediate with AWS Lambda and AWS Systems Manager, and optimize Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS performance.
• Implement Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and Multi-AZ designs, and restore workloads with AWS Backup to meet RTO and RPO.
• Provision resources with AWS CloudFormation and AWS CDK, share stacks with AWS RAM, and automate operations with AWS Systems Manager and Amazon EventBridge.
• Apply IAM, AWS Organizations SCPs, and AWS Config controls, encrypt data with AWS KMS and ACM, and remediate AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty findings.
• Configure Amazon VPC, Route 53, and Amazon CloudFront, and troubleshoot connectivity with VPC flow logs and VPC Reachability Analyzer.

About this practice exam

The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate exam tests a candidate’s ability to deploy, manage, and operate workloads on AWS: support and maintain AWS workloads according to the AWS Well-Architected Framework; perform operations by using the AWS Management Console and the AWS CLI; implement security controls to meet compliance requirements; monitor, log, and troubleshoot systems; apply networking concepts; implement high availability, performance, and capacity requirements; perform business continuity and disaster recovery procedures; and identify, classify, and remediate incidents. This practice exam prepares you for AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) across Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization; Reliability and Business Continuity; Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation; Security and Compliance; and Networking and Content Delivery.

The exam emphasizes Amazon CloudWatch metrics, alarms, dashboards, and the CloudWatch agent; AWS CloudTrail and Amazon EventBridge; remediation with AWS Lambda and AWS Systems Manager; performance optimization for Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon FSx, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS); Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and Multi-AZ resilience; AWS Backup, recovery time objective (RTO), and recovery point objective (RPO); provisioning with AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK); IAM, AWS Organizations, AWS Config, encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and findings from AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty; and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, and connectivity troubleshooting. It does not primarily assess designing distributed architectures, designing CI/CD pipelines, designing hybrid and multi-VPC networking, developing software, defining security, compliance, and governance requirements, developing ransomware defense strategies, assessing and planning resource capacity, analyzing costs and total cost of ownership, or managing billing and invoicing for AWS services.

The official AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) exam is 65 questions in 130 minutes. This practice exam follows the five official CloudOps Engineer – Associate domains and their published weights.

The certification validates understanding of:

• Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization: metrics, alarms, filters, and dashboards with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus; CloudWatch agent collection from Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS); EventBridge routing and Systems Manager Automation runbooks; and performance optimization for compute, Amazon EBS volume types, Amazon S3 transfer and lifecycle, Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx shared storage, and Amazon RDS including Performance Insights and Amazon RDS Proxy.
• Reliability and Business Continuity: scaling for compute and managed databases including Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB; caching with Amazon CloudFront and Amazon ElastiCache; highly available designs with Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53 health checks, and Multi-AZ deployments; and backup and restore with AWS Backup, snapshots, Amazon S3 versioning, point-in-time restore, RTO, RPO, and disaster recovery strategies including backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and active/active.
• Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation: Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and container images with EC2 Image Builder; infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation and AWS CDK; multi-account and multi-Region sharing with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) and CloudFormation StackSets; remediation of deployment issues such as subnet sizing, stack errors, and permissions; and operational automation with AWS Systems Manager, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3 Event Notifications, and Amazon EventBridge.
• Security and Compliance: IAM password policies, multi-factor authentication (MFA), roles, federated identity, resource policies, and policy conditions; access troubleshooting with AWS CloudTrail, IAM Access Analyzer, and the IAM policy simulator; multi-account controls with AWS Organizations, service control policies (SCPs), and AWS IAM Identity Center; continuous monitoring with AWS Config conformance packs and AWS Trusted Advisor; encryption at rest with AWS KMS and in transit with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM); secrets with AWS Secrets Manager; and findings from AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Config.
• Networking and Content Delivery: Amazon VPC subnets, route tables, network access control lists (ACLs), security groups, NAT gateways, and internet gateways; private connectivity with VPC endpoints, AWS PrivateLink, and VPC peering; network protection with Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, and AWS Network Firewall; DNS and routing with Amazon Route 53; content delivery with Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator; and troubleshooting with VPC flow logs, Elastic Load Balancing access logs, VPC Reachability Analyzer, and Amazon CloudWatch network monitoring.