SOA-C02 cheat sheet

Exam at a glance

Domain weightings

How much of the exam each domain covers. Spend your study time in proportion — the heavier the domain, the more questions you'll see.

Key terms

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources. SysOps administrators use CloudWatch metrics, alarms, dashboards, and Logs Insights to detect and respond to operational issues.

CloudWatch Alarm

A CloudWatch alarm is a rule that watches a metric and changes state when it crosses a threshold, triggering actions such as notifying an SNS topic, scaling a group, or recovering an EC2 instance. Alarms are central to automated monitoring and remediation.

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon EventBridge is an event bus service that routes events from AWS services and applications to targets such as Lambda functions or Systems Manager Automation. It is commonly used to trigger automated remediation when an operational event occurs.

EC2 Auto Scaling

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a service that automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in a group to match demand using scaling policies and health checks. It underpins both elasticity and high availability by replacing unhealthy instances across Availability Zones.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code service that provisions and manages AWS resources from declarative templates. SysOps administrators use stacks, stack sets, and drift detection to deploy consistently and detect manual changes.

AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager is a service for operating and automating management of AWS resources at scale, including Automation runbooks, Run Command, State Manager, Patch Manager, and Parameter Store. It is the primary tool for automating manual or repeatable operational processes.

Multi-AZ Deployment

A Multi-AZ deployment runs resources across two or more Availability Zones so a failure in one zone does not take down the workload. It is the core pattern for high availability, used by services such as RDS Multi-AZ and Auto Scaling across zones.

AWS Backup

AWS Backup is a centralized service that automates and manages backups across AWS services such as EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, and EFS using backup plans and vaults. It supports the backup, restore, and cross-Region strategies that meet defined RTO and RPO targets.

Amazon EBS

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a block-storage service providing volumes for EC2 instances, with types ranging from general-purpose SSD (gp3) to provisioned-IOPS SSD (io2). SysOps work includes choosing volume types for performance and taking EBS snapshots for backup.

AWS KMS

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that creates and controls the encryption keys used to protect data at rest across AWS services. SysOps administrators use KMS keys and key policies to enforce encryption for EBS, S3, RDS, and other resources.

VPC Flow Logs

VPC Flow Logs capture information about IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in a VPC. They are a primary tool for troubleshooting connectivity, showing whether traffic was accepted or rejected by security groups and network ACLs.

Security Group

A security group is a stateful virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic for AWS resources such as EC2 instances. Because it is stateful, return traffic is automatically allowed; SysOps troubleshooting often compares security groups against stateless network ACLs.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable DNS and domain service that also provides health checks and routing policies such as latency, weighted, and failover. SysOps administrators use it for DNS management and to route traffic for high availability.