AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02)

About the SOA-C02 exam

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) was the AWS exam for people who run workloads on AWS day to day rather than design them. Where Solutions Architect asks which services to choose, SysOps asked how you keep them running: how you monitor them, what you automate, how you recover when something breaks, and how you keep the bill and the attack surface under control.

AWS offered SOA-C02 until September 29, 2025. From September 30, 2025 it was replaced by SOA-C03, and the certification was renamed AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate. If you already hold the SysOps certification you keep it under its old name for its full three years. You do not need to sit the new exam until it is time to renew.

What SOA-C02 covered

The exam had 65 questions, either multiple choice or multiple response, in 130 minutes. It used AWS's usual scaled score, 100 to 1,000 with 720 to pass. Its six domains and their share of scored questions were:

• Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation (20%). CloudWatch metrics, alarms and logs, the CloudWatch agent, EventBridge rules and automatic fixes with Systems Manager.
• Reliability and Business Continuity (16%). Auto Scaling, load balancer health checks, Multi-AZ databases, backups and restores.
• Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation (18%). CloudFormation, AMIs, Systems Manager and repeatable deployments.
• Security and Compliance (16%). IAM, AWS Config rules, encryption with KMS and audit trails.
• Networking and Content Delivery (18%). VPCs, subnets, NAT gateways, network ACLs, Route 53 and CloudFront.
• Cost and Performance Optimization (12%). Rightsizing, EBS volume types, Spot and Savings Plans, and finding waste.

What changed in SOA-C03

According to AWS's comparison of the two versions, most of the old exam carries straight over. The number of questions, the time and the price stayed the same. The changes were:

• Five domains instead of six. Cost and Performance Optimization is gone as a separate domain. Its tasks moved into Domain 1, which is now "Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization" at 22%.
• New weights. Reliability and Deployment both rose to 22%. Security (16%) and Networking (18%) stayed the same.
• Containers and the CDK. The CloudWatch agent is now tested on Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS clusters as well as EC2 instances, and stacks can be built with the AWS CDK as well as CloudFormation.
• Compliance and network monitoring. New tasks cover enforcing rules such as which Regions and services may be used, and CloudWatch's network monitoring features.
• Small moves and cuts. VPNs moved from security into networking, and S3 static website hosting was dropped.

How to use these questions now

The test here was written for SOA-C02 and is kept as an archive, not updated. It still works well as practice for the parts that did not change: CloudWatch alarms and metric filters, Auto Scaling health checks, cross-Region backup copies, Session Manager, CloudFormation deletion policies, Config remediation, NAT gateway placement, network ACL ephemeral ports and moving EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3. Each one has a full explanation of why the right answer is right and why the others are wrong.

If you are preparing for SOA-C03, treat this test as a warm-up. Add study on the new material above, especially monitoring containers and building stacks with the CDK, and check the current exam guide on the AWS certification site before you book.

These questions are original, written from the public AWS documentation and the exam guide. They are not real exam questions, and this site is not affiliated with AWS.