AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03)
The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) exam is intended for CloudOps engineers. The exam validates a candidate's ability to deploy, manage, and operate workloads on AWS.
Introduction
The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03)
The exam also validates a candidate's ability to complete the following tasks:
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 (for example, DNS, TCP, IP, firewalls).
Implement architectural requirements (for example, high availability, performance, capacity).
Perform business continuity and disaster recovery procedures.
Identify, classify, and remediate incidents.
Target candidate description
The target candidate should have 1 year of experience with deployment, management, troubleshooting, networking, and security on AWS. The target candidate also should have at least 1 year of experience in a related operations role such as system administrator.
Recommended general IT knowledge and experience
The target candidate should have the following general IT knowledge and experience:
Techniques for monitoring, logging, and troubleshooting
Networking concepts (for example, DNS, TCP, IP, firewalls)
Implementation of architectural requirements (for example, high availability, performance, capacity)
Familiarity with at least one scripting language
Familiarity with at least one major operating system
Understanding of cloud computing
Containerization and orchestration basics
Understanding of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and Git
Recommended AWS knowledge and experience
The target candidate should have the following AWS knowledge:
The AWS Well-Architected Framework
AWS storage and container solutions
AWS monitoring tools
How to use the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions, and AWS CloudFormation
AWS networking and security services
How to implement AWS security controls and compliance requirements
Cloud financial management
Operations within hybrid and multi-VPC environments
AWS database services (for example, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache)
AWS compute services (for example, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS])
Job tasks that are out of scope for the target candidate
The following list contains job tasks that the target candidate is not expected to be able to perform. This list is non-exhaustive. These tasks are out of scope for the exam:
Design distributed architectures.
Design CI/CD pipelines.
Design hybrid and multi-VPC networking.
Develop software.
Define security, compliance, and governance requirements.
Develop ransomware defense strategies.
Assess and plan resource capacity.
Analyze costs and total cost of ownership.
Manage billing and invoicing for AWS services.
Exam content
Response types
The exam includes two types of questions:
Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors)
Multiple response: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options
Multiple choice and multiple response: Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or skill might choose. Distractors are generally plausible responses that match the content area.
On the exam, unanswered questions are scored as incorrect. There is no penalty for guessing. The exam includes 50 questions that affect your score. These questions include multiple-choice questions and multiple-response questions. Each scored multiple-choice question and each scored multiple-response question counts as a single scored opportunity.
Unscored content
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
Exam results
The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) exam has a pass or fail designation. The exam is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and guidelines.
Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720. Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.
Your score report could contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.
Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other sections have. The table of classifications contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use caution when you interpret section-level feedback.
Content outline
This exam guide includes weightings, content domains, and task statements for the exam. This guide does not provide a comprehensive list of the content on the exam. However, additional context for each task statement is available to help you prepare for the exam.
The exam has the following content domains and weightings:
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