AWS SysOps Administrator
Amazon Web Services
Complete guide to passing the AWS SysOps Administrator exam on your first attempt.
$150
~60%
3 years
Global
Amazon Web Services
$90k-$135k
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Complete Overview
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate is now called AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate, exam code SOA-C03, and it is a 130-minute, 65-question exam costing 150 USD for engineers who deploy, manage and operate workloads on AWS. AWS listed September 29, 2025 as the last day to sit the old SOA-C02 version, and SOA-C03 has been the live exam since September 30, 2025. Anyone who already holds the SysOps Administrator - Associate credential keeps that title and keeps it valid for three years from the date it was earned; the CloudOps Engineer name applies only to people who pass SOA-C03.
AWS describes the target candidate as having one year of experience with deployment, management, troubleshooting, networking and security on AWS, plus at least one year in a related operations role such as system administrator. Recommended background includes familiarity with at least one scripting language, at least one major operating system, container and orchestration basics, and CI/CD and Git.
Pearson VUE delivers the exam at a test center or through online proctoring. It is offered in English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese, a shorter list than most AWS associate exams. Of the 65 questions, 50 are scored and 15 are unscored pretest items that are not identified during the exam. Questions are multiple choice, with one correct answer and three distractors, or multiple response, with two or more correct answers from five or more options. Each scored question counts as a single scored opportunity. Results are reported as a scaled score from 100 to 1,000 and the minimum passing score is 720. Scoring is compensatory, so a weak domain can be offset by a strong one.
SOA-C03 has five content domains: Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization at 22 percent; Reliability and Business Continuity at 22 percent; Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation at 22 percent; Security and Compliance at 16 percent; and Networking and Content Delivery at 18 percent. The old sixth domain, Cost and Performance Optimization, was removed as a standalone domain and its tasks were folded into Task 1.3 of the new Domain 1. AWS also added the CloudWatch agent, the AWS CDK alongside CloudFormation, compliance enforcement through Region and service selections, and CloudWatch network monitoring services. S3 static website hosting was removed, and VPNs moved from the security domain to the networking domain.
The exam guide names newer tooling directly, including Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, AWS Backup, AWS Security Agent, Kiro and AWS DevOps Agent for automated remediation, and Terraform and Git as third-party deployment tools. The certification is valid for three years and can be recertified by passing the current version or by earning AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional.
Why Get AWS SysOps Administrator Certified?
The exam costs 150 USD for 130 minutes and covers the operational surface most on-call rotations actually touch: CloudWatch alarms, Auto Scaling, backups, VPC troubleshooting and IAM permission failures.
Three of the five domains carry 22 percent each, so a candidate who is strong in monitoring, reliability and automation already covers 66 percent of the scored content.
Passing recertifies nothing else automatically, but earning AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional later recertifies this credential, and passing any AWS exam grants a 50 percent discount voucher toward the next one.
SOA-C03 folded cost optimization into the monitoring domain, which means the exam now rewards engineers who can connect a performance metric to a bill line rather than treating them as separate skills.
The blueprint names hybrid and multi-VPC operations, transit gateways, PrivateLink and VPC endpoints, which are the areas where operations engineers most often get stuck without formal study.
AWS holds the CloudOps credential valid for three years, and existing SysOps Administrator - Associate holders are not required to retake anything to keep their current certification valid.
Because 15 of the 65 questions are unscored pretest items, only 50 questions decide the result, so a small number of genuinely unfamiliar questions does not sink an otherwise solid performance.
Exam Format & Structure
Duration
130 minutes
Questions
65 questions, of which 50 are scored and 15 are unscored pretest items
Passing Score
720 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000, using a compensatory model so no individual domain has to be passed
Question Types
- Multiple choice: one correct response and three incorrect responses
- Multiple response: two or more correct responses out of five or more response options
- Unscored pretest questions that are mixed in and not identified
- AWS publishes no hands-on lab component for SOA-C03; the published format is multiple choice and multiple response only
Delivery Method
Pearson VUE test center or Pearson VUE online proctored exam (OnVUE)
Exam Domains & Topics
The largest domain, and larger than its SOA-C02 equivalent, because the old Cost and Performance Optimization domain was folded into its third task. It covers building metrics, alarms and filters, remediating issues automatically, and tuning compute, storage and database performance. Expect scenarios where a metric or log line points to one specific misconfiguration.
Key Topics to Master:
- CloudWatch, CloudTrail and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus for serverless, compute and AI workloads
- Configuring and managing the CloudWatch agent on EC2 instances, Amazon ECS clusters and Amazon EKS clusters
- Composite CloudWatch alarms, the actions they can invoke, and alarms routed through Amazon EventBridge
- Cross-account and cross-Region CloudWatch dashboards that are customizable and shareable
- Systems Manager Automation runbooks, both predefined and custom, for automated remediation
- EBS performance metrics, volume type selection, and EC2 placement groups
- S3 performance strategies including AWS DataSync, S3 Transfer Acceleration, multipart uploads and S3 Lifecycle policies
- Shared storage choices among Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx and Amazon S3 Files, including EFS lifecycle policies
- Amazon RDS Performance Insights, proactive recommendations and RDS Proxy
This domain grew from 16 percent in SOA-C02 to 22 percent in SOA-C03. It covers scalability and elasticity, highly available and resilient environments, and backup and restore. Questions frequently give you an RTO and an RPO and ask which recovery approach meets them at the lowest cost, which is the same tradeoff the exam guide names explicitly.
Key Topics to Master:
- Scaling mechanisms in compute environments, including Auto Scaling groups and scaling policies
- Caching for dynamic scalability with Amazon CloudFront and Amazon ElastiCache
- Scaling AWS managed databases including Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB
- Configuring and troubleshooting Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 health checks
- Multi-AZ deployments and other fault-tolerant configurations
- Automated snapshots and backups for EC2 instances, RDS DB instances, EBS volumes, S3 buckets and DynamoDB tables using AWS Backup
- Point-in-time restore and other database restore methods against RTO, RPO and cost requirements
- Versioning for Amazon S3 and Amazon FSx
- Disaster recovery patterns: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active/active
Also grown, from 18 percent to 22 percent. It covers provisioning and maintaining cloud resources and automating the management of resources that already exist. SOA-C03 added the AWS CDK alongside CloudFormation, and the guide explicitly includes third-party tools, so Terraform and Git are fair game rather than out of scope.
Key Topics to Master:
- Creating and managing AMIs and container images, including EC2 Image Builder
- Creating and managing AWS resources with CloudFormation and the AWS CDK
- Diagnosing deployment failures such as subnet sizing issues, CloudFormation errors and permissions issues
- Cross-Region and cross-account provisioning with AWS Resource Access Manager and CloudFormation StackSets
- Deployment strategies and the AWS services that implement them
- Third-party automation tooling including Terraform and Git
- Automating operational processes with AWS Systems Manager
- Event-driven automation with Lambda, S3 Event Notifications, EventBridge and AWS DevOps Agent
Unchanged in weight from SOA-C02. It covers implementing and managing security and compliance tooling, and protecting data and infrastructure. VPN content moved out of this domain into networking for SOA-C03, and compliance enforcement through Region and service selections and AWS Config conformance packs moved in.
Key Topics to Master:
- IAM password policies, MFA, roles, federated identity, resource policies and policy conditions
- Auditing and troubleshooting access with CloudTrail, IAM Access Analyzer and the IAM policy simulator
- Multi-account strategy with AWS Organizations, service control policies and IAM Identity Center
- Remediating AWS Trusted Advisor security check findings
- Enforcing compliance through Region and service selections and AWS Config conformance packs
- Data classification schemes and their enforcement
- Encryption at rest with AWS KMS and encryption in transit with AWS Certificate Manager
- Storing secrets securely with AWS services
- Findings and reports from AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Config, Amazon Inspector and AWS Security Agent
Unchanged in weight, but it absorbed VPN content from the security domain and gained CloudWatch network monitoring services. It covers implementing and optimizing connectivity, configuring domains, DNS and content delivery, and troubleshooting network connectivity. S3 static website hosting was removed from this domain in SOA-C03.
Key Topics to Master:
- VPC construction: subnets, route tables, network ACLs, security groups, NAT gateways, internet gateways and egress-only internet gateways
- Private connectivity with VPC endpoints, AWS PrivateLink and VPC peering
- Auditing Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, AWS WAF, AWS Shield and AWS Network Firewall in a single account
- Optimizing the cost of network architectures
- Route 53 routing policies, resolver configuration and query logging
- Content and service distribution with CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator, and remediating CloudFront caching issues
- Reading VPC flow logs, ELB access logs, AWS WAF web ACL logs, CloudFront logs and container logs
- Troubleshooting transit gateways, NAT gateways and hybrid or private connectivity
- Configuring and analyzing CloudWatch network monitoring services
Recommended Study Plan
- 1Read the SOA-C03 exam guide on docs.aws.amazon.com, including the side-by-side comparison of SOA-C02 and SOA-C03 so you do not study retired content
- 2Read the in-scope and out-of-scope AWS service lists for SOA-C03 and delete out-of-scope topics from your plan
- 3Take the free AWS Certification Official Practice Question Set for the CloudOps Engineer - Associate exam
- 4Enrol in the AWS Skill Builder Exam Prep Plan for AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03)
- 5Build a study tracker weighted 22, 22, 22, 16 and 18 to match the domains
- 1Install and configure the CloudWatch agent on an EC2 instance to ship memory and disk metrics plus a log file
- 2Repeat the agent configuration for an ECS task and note what changes
- 3Build a composite alarm from two metric alarms and route it through EventBridge to an SNS topic
- 4Create a cross-account, cross-Region CloudWatch dashboard and share it
- 5Query CloudWatch Logs Insights against a real log group and extract an error rate
- 1Run a predefined Systems Manager Automation runbook, then write a custom runbook that restarts a failed service
- 2Trigger a Lambda remediation function from a CloudWatch alarm and from an EventBridge rule, and compare the two paths
- 3Configure Systems Manager Patch Manager and State Manager on a small fleet
- 4Use EventBridge input transformers to enrich an event before it reaches a target, and add a dead-letter queue
- 5Break an EventBridge rule on purpose and practise reading why events are not reaching the target
- 1Build an Auto Scaling group with target tracking, then with step scaling, and compare how each reacts to a load spike
- 2Configure ALB and NLB health checks, then break the target on purpose and read the target group health reason codes
- 3Configure Route 53 health checks with failover routing and observe a failover
- 4Convert a single-AZ RDS instance to Multi-AZ and trigger a failover
- 5Add ElastiCache in front of a read-heavy database path and measure the change
- 1Create an AWS Backup plan covering EC2, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB and S3 with a cross-Region copy
- 2Perform a point-in-time restore on RDS and record the actual elapsed time as your practical RTO
- 3Enable S3 versioning plus MFA delete and test recovering a deleted object
- 4Write down the cost and RTO profile of backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active for one workload
- 5Restore an EBS snapshot to a new volume in a different Availability Zone
- 1Deploy a stack with CloudFormation, then rebuild the same stack with the AWS CDK and compare the synthesized template
- 2Deploy a CloudFormation StackSet to two accounts or two Regions
- 3Share a resource across accounts with AWS Resource Access Manager
- 4Build an AMI with EC2 Image Builder and version it
- 5Deliberately cause three CloudFormation failures (insufficient subnet size, missing IAM permission, invalid parameter) and read each error
- 1Write an IAM policy with a condition key, test it in the IAM policy simulator, and then find the same denial in CloudTrail
- 2Apply a service control policy in AWS Organizations that restricts Regions, and confirm the effect
- 3Enable AWS Config with a conformance pack and remediate one non-compliant resource
- 4Turn on GuardDuty and Security Hub, generate sample findings, and route them to a single view
- 5Encrypt an S3 bucket and an RDS instance with a customer managed KMS key and inspect the key policy
- 1Build a VPC by hand with public and private subnets, a NAT gateway and an egress-only internet gateway for IPv6
- 2Create a gateway VPC endpoint for S3 and an interface endpoint with PrivateLink, and check the route table and DNS differences
- 3Enable VPC flow logs and trace one blocked connection to the exact security group or network ACL rule
- 4Configure a CloudFront distribution with a cache policy, then reproduce and fix a stale-cache problem
- 5Compare Route 53 latency-based, weighted, geolocation and failover routing on the same record set
- 1Sit the AWS Certification Official Practice Exam for CloudOps Engineer - Associate under a 130-minute timer
- 2Sit a full Tutorials Dojo or Stephane Maarek SOA-C03 practice set and tag every miss by domain
- 3Rework each missed question against AWS documentation rather than the explanation alone
- 4Re-read the SOA-C02 to SOA-C03 comparison page and check you know each addition and deletion
- 5Drill the troubleshooting task statements in Domain 5 specifically, since they carry the most scenario weight per topic
- 1Schedule through your AWS Certification Account and confirm your profile name is identical to your ID
- 2Run the AWS Exam Demo at Pearson VUE to practise flag, review and comment controls
- 3Do a timed 2-minutes-per-question pass and practise answering rather than skipping
- 4Rebuild a VPC, an Auto Scaling group and an AWS Backup plan from memory with no documentation open
- 5If testing online, run the Pearson VUE system test on the exact machine and network you will use
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Best Study Resources
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate exam guide (SOA-C03)
Official exam blueprintThe current blueprint, with the five domains at 22, 22, 22, 16 and 18 percent, every task and skill statement, and the in-scope and out-of-scope service lists. This replaces the SOA-C02 guide that most older study material still follows.
Free
Comparison of SOA-C02 and SOA-C03
Official change logA side-by-side table of the old and new domain weights plus the exact additions, deletions and recategorizations. Read this if you started studying before September 30, 2025, so you can drop S3 static website hosting and pick up the CloudWatch agent and AWS CDK content.
Free
AWS Skill Builder Exam Prep Plan: AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03)
Official learning planAWS's four-step plan for this exam, including an Official Pretest to identify weak areas, digital courses, domain review with flashcards, and a final practice exam.
Free tier plus paid Individual subscription for the full set
AWS Certification Official Practice Question Set and Official Practice Exam
Official practiceThe closest available match to real question wording and difficulty for SOA-C03. Treat the timed practice exam as your readiness gate rather than as a study tool.
Question set free, practice exam included with an AWS Skill Builder subscription
AWS Builder Labs, AWS Cloud Quest and AWS Jam
Hands-on labs and scenariosOperations questions describe symptoms, so time in a real console beats reading. AWS Jam in particular runs break-fix scenarios that mirror the remediation task statements in Domain 1.
Included with an AWS Skill Builder Individual subscription
Amazon CloudWatch User Guide and CloudWatch agent documentation
Official documentationSOA-C03 added CloudWatch agent configuration on EC2, ECS and EKS as an explicit skill. The agent configuration file schema, composite alarms and cross-account observability sections are the highest-yield reading for the 22 percent Domain 1.
Free
AWS Systems Manager User Guide, Automation runbooks section
Official documentationTask 1.2 names creating and running custom and predefined Automation runbooks. Reading the runbook document schema and running two or three of the AWS-owned runbooks covers the remediation questions directly.
Free
Adrian Cantrill, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate course
Video course with labsA long-form course built around demos you construct yourself. Check which exam version the current release targets, since course catalogues were still transitioning from SOA-C02 to SOA-C03 naming.
Paid one-off purchase
Stephane Maarek, Ultimate AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate on Udemy
Video courseService-by-service lecture coverage with hands-on demos, useful for building breadth across five domains quickly. Confirm the course has been updated for the SOA-C03 blueprint before relying on the domain ordering.
Paid, price varies with Udemy promotions
Tutorials Dojo practice exams for AWS SysOps Administrator / CloudOps Engineer Associate
Practice questionsTimed sets with explanations that cite AWS documentation. Use them to locate blind spots in the troubleshooting task statements, which are where most candidates lose points.
Paid
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Studying the SOA-C02 blueprint, including the retired Cost and Performance Optimization domain, because most third-party courses were written for it.
SOA-C02 stopped being offered after September 29, 2025. Read the official SOA-C02 to SOA-C03 comparison page, drop the standalone cost domain, and pick up its tasks inside Task 1.3 of the new Domain 1.
Expecting hands-on exam labs because older SysOps material describes them.
AWS publishes the SOA-C03 format as 65 multiple choice or multiple response questions and does not list a lab component. Prepare by doing labs, but plan your 130 minutes around 65 written questions.
Reading CloudWatch metrics only in the console and never configuring the CloudWatch agent.
Memory and disk metrics from EC2 require the agent. SOA-C03 added agent configuration on EC2, ECS and EKS as a named skill, so write an agent configuration file at least once and know where it lives on the instance.
Answering VPC connectivity questions by security group alone and ignoring network ACLs and route tables.
Task 5.3 is dedicated to troubleshooting VPC configurations. Practise a fixed order: route table, then network ACL in both directions, then security group, then NAT or gateway, then DNS. Network ACLs are stateless, so the return path must be allowed explicitly.
Treating RTO and RPO as interchangeable when picking a disaster recovery pattern.
RPO sets how much data you can lose and drives backup frequency and replication. RTO sets how long you can be down and drives whether pilot light is enough or you need warm standby. Task 2.3 asks you to meet both plus a cost constraint, so decide each independently.
Assuming Auto Scaling questions are about scaling policies when the failure is actually the health check.
An Auto Scaling group using EC2 status checks will not replace an instance whose application has failed but whose OS is healthy. Switch the health check type to ELB and set a health check grace period long enough for boot.
Ignoring the AWS CDK because CloudFormation has always been enough.
Skill 3.1.2 in SOA-C03 names CloudFormation and the AWS CDK together. Synthesize one CDK app to a CloudFormation template so you can answer questions about how the two relate rather than guessing.
Skipping cross-account topics because your day job runs in a single account.
Skill 4.1.3 covers AWS Organizations, service control policies and IAM Identity Center, and skill 3.1.4 covers AWS RAM and StackSets. Create a second AWS account, or at least read how an SCP interacts with an identity-based policy, since an SCP can only deny what a permission grants.
Booking the exam expecting the same language options as other AWS associate exams.
This exam is offered in English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese only. If English is not your first language and you are testing in English, request the ESL +30 accommodation before you register.
Exam Day Tips
- 1
You have 130 minutes for 65 questions. Troubleshooting scenarios in the networking domain are the longest to read, so build a time buffer on the monitoring questions early.
- 2
Read the exam name on your confirmation carefully. Since September 30, 2025 the live exam is AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03), and it appears under that name at Pearson VUE.
- 3
Test center candidates need two primary IDs, or one primary and one secondary; online proctored candidates need one primary ID. First and last names must match your AWS Certification Account exactly, and account name changes take two business days.
- 4
Arrive at the test center 15 to 30 minutes early. For online proctoring you can launch up to 30 minutes early, and being more than 15 minutes late forfeits the fee.
- 5
There are no scheduled breaks. At a test center an unscheduled break runs the clock down, you cannot leave the building, and you must repeat check-in. Online proctored, no breaks are permitted and you may not leave the camera view.
- 6
Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect and there is no guessing penalty, so answer every question before flagging it for review.
- 7
Multiple-response questions state how many answers to select. Count the options first, because five-option questions are the ones most likely to be multiple response.
- 8
The Comment button subtracts from your exam clock. Flag questions during the exam and only add comments once you have completed all 65.
- 9
Most AWS exams show no pass or fail on screen. Detailed results land in your AWS Certification Account under Exam History within five business days.
Career Paths & Salary Ranges
Cloud operations engineer
Runs day-to-day AWS operations including alarms, patching, capacity and incident response. AWS lists CloudOps Engineer and Cloud Operator among the candidate roles for this exam, and the five domains match the on-call surface almost exactly.
$90k-$135k
Cloud support engineer
Diagnoses customer or internal issues across networking, storage, IAM and compute. Domain 5 troubleshooting content, including VPC flow logs and ELB access logs, is the daily toolkit for this role.
$90k-$135k
Systems administrator moving to cloud
Applies existing operating system, networking and scripting skills to AWS. AWS names one year in a related operations role such as system administrator as the expected background, which makes this the natural first AWS certification for that transition.
$90k-$135k
Site reliability engineer
Owns availability targets, error budgets and automated remediation. The 22 percent Reliability and Business Continuity domain plus the Systems Manager Automation content map to the automation-first side of the role.
$90k-$135k
Cloud migration or systems integration engineer
Stands up and operates workloads during and after migration. AWS lists Migration Specialist and Cloud Systems Integration Engineer as candidate roles, and the provisioning domain covers StackSets, AWS RAM and cross-Region deployment.
$90k-$135k
DevOps engineer
Bridges automation and operations using CloudFormation, the AWS CDK, Terraform and Git, all of which SOA-C03 names. Earning AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional later also recertifies this credential automatically.
$90k-$135k
Prerequisites & Requirements
- There are no mandatory prerequisites. AWS states that all AWS Certifications may be earned without completing specific prerequisites.
- AWS recommends one year of experience with deployment, management, troubleshooting, networking and security on AWS.
- AWS also recommends at least one year of experience in a related operations role such as system administrator.
- Recommended general knowledge includes monitoring and logging techniques, networking concepts such as DNS, TCP, IP and firewalls, familiarity with at least one scripting language and one major operating system, container and orchestration basics, and CI/CD and Git.
- Recommended AWS knowledge includes the AWS Well-Architected Framework, CloudFormation and other infrastructure as code, AWS networking and security services, cloud financial management, hybrid and multi-VPC operations, and the main compute and database services.
- Candidates with no IT work experience are advised by AWS to earn AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner first. Candidates must be at least 13 years old.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate exam still available?
No. AWS listed September 29, 2025 as the last day to take the SOA-C02 version of AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate. Since September 30, 2025 the live exam is SOA-C03, and passing it earns AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate. If you already hold the SysOps Administrator - Associate certification, it stays valid for three years from the date you earned it and you are not required to retake anything.
Will my existing SysOps Administrator - Associate certification be renamed?
No. AWS states the CloudOps Engineer - Associate name applies only to people who pass SOA-C03 and will not be applied retroactively. Holders of an active AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional together with SysOps Administrator - Associate can continue recertifying both by passing the current DevOps Engineer - Professional exam.
How much does the exam cost?
It costs 150 USD as an associate-level exam. AWS also publishes 128 EUR, 224 AUD, 20,000 JPY, 197,287 KRW, 1,057 CNY, and 12,829.50 INR through the Pearson Mindhub voucher store. Taxes such as VAT may apply, and AWS updates foreign exchange rates at least annually in May with at least 30 days notice.
What is the passing score?
720 on a scaled range of 100 to 1,000. Only 50 of the 65 questions are scored, the other 15 are unscored pretest items. Scoring is compensatory, so you need 720 overall rather than a passing mark in each of the five domains.
What happens if I fail?
You must wait 14 calendar days before retaking it. There is no cap on the number of attempts, but you pay the full 150 USD each time. Failing to appear for a booked appointment, or cancelling inside 24 hours of it, forfeits the exam fee. Once you pass, you cannot retake the same exam for two years unless AWS publishes a new version with a new exam series code.
How long do results take?
Detailed results appear in your AWS Certification Account under Exam History within five business days, and AWS emails you when they are posted. Most AWS Certification exams do not display pass or fail at the end of the session. A Credly badge notification sometimes arrives before the score report does.
Does the exam still include hands-on labs?
AWS publishes the SOA-C03 format as 65 questions that are either multiple choice or multiple response, and lists no lab component. Older material describing exam labs refers to an earlier configuration of the SysOps exam. Plan your 130 minutes around written questions.
What changed between SOA-C02 and SOA-C03?
The standalone Cost and Performance Optimization domain, worth 12 percent, was removed and its tasks moved into Task 1.3 of Domain 1. Domains 1, 2 and 3 rose to 22 percent each; Security and Compliance stayed at 16 percent and Networking and Content Delivery at 18 percent. AWS added the CloudWatch agent, CloudFormation with the AWS CDK, compliance enforcement through Region and service selections, and CloudWatch network monitoring. S3 static website hosting was removed, and VPNs moved from the security domain to networking.
What ID do I need on exam day?
One primary ID for an online proctored exam, and either two primary IDs or one primary plus one secondary at a test center. A primary ID must be original, unexpired, government-issued, in Roman characters, with a recent photo and a visible signature. Photocopied, laminated paper and digital IDs are not accepted, and the name must match your AWS Certification Account exactly.
Can I take a break during the exam?
AWS does not configure scheduled breaks. In a test center you may take an unscheduled break, but the timer keeps running, you cannot leave the building, and you have to repeat check-in to resume. For online proctored exams no breaks are allowed, including restroom breaks, and standing up or leaving the camera view ends the session.
Can I use a calculator, notes or reference material?
No external reference material is permitted. Test center rules on erasable note boards come from the Pearson VUE Candidate Rules Agreement. Comfort aids such as medicines and medical devices do not need prior approval, and Pearson VUE publishes the current allowed list.
Are accommodations available?
Yes. Accommodations are arranged with Pearson VUE and must be requested before you schedule the exam. AWS separately offers an ESL +30 accommodation adding 30 minutes for non-native English speakers taking an exam in English. Request ESL +30 once through your AWS Certification Account and it applies to all future registrations.
How do I recertify?
The certification is valid for three years. Recertify by passing the current version of the exam, or by earning AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional, which automatically recertifies this associate credential. AWS certifications do not use continuing education credits.
Can I reschedule or cancel?
Yes, up to 24 hours before your appointment without a fee, through the Manage Pearson VUE exams button in your AWS Certification Account. Each appointment can be rescheduled twice only. Inside 24 hours the full delivery fee is charged, although Pearson VUE will waive it for documented illness or an unforeseen emergency.
How does this compare to AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate?
Both cost 150 USD and use 65 questions in 130 minutes, but Solutions Architect - Associate asks which architecture to choose while CloudOps Engineer - Associate asks how to run, monitor and repair one that already exists. This exam goes deeper on CloudWatch, Systems Manager, backup and VPC troubleshooting, and it explicitly places designing distributed architectures and designing hybrid networking out of scope.
How does it compare to AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional?
The DevOps Engineer - Professional exam costs 300 USD and assumes you can design pipelines and multi-account automation, which this exam lists as out of scope. AWS positions CloudOps Engineer - Associate as the operations-side stepping stone toward it, and passing the professional exam recertifies this one.
What languages is the exam offered in?
English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. That is a shorter list than several other AWS associate exams, which also offer Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish (Latin America). Candidates who take a localized version can toggle to view questions in English during the exam.
Do I get a discount on my next AWS exam?
Yes. Earning any AWS Certification gives you a 50 percent discount voucher for your next AWS Certification exam, available in the Benefits section of your AWS Certification Account within five business days of passing.
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