SOA-C03 cheat sheet
A one-page reference for the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate exam: the format, how the domains are weighted, and the glossary terms for this exam.
Exam at a glance
Vendor
AWS
Level
Associate
Questions
65
Time
130 min
Mock pass mark
72%
Domains
5
Practice Qs
159
Code
SOA-C03
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 service that collects metrics, logs, and alarms for AWS resources and applications. SOA-C03 covers it as the core of the monitoring, logging, analysis, and remediation domain.
- CloudWatch Alarm
- A CloudWatch alarm is a rule that watches a metric and triggers actions — notifications, Auto Scaling, or automated remediation — when a threshold is breached. SOA-C03 covers alarms for remediation and reliability.
- Amazon EventBridge
- Amazon EventBridge is an event bus that routes events between AWS services and triggers targets such as Lambda for automated responses. SOA-C03 covers it for event-driven remediation and automation.
- EC2 Auto Scaling
- EC2 Auto Scaling is a service that automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances using launch templates and scaling policies. SOA-C03 covers it for scalability and reliability in the business-continuity domain.
- Multi-AZ Deployment
- A Multi-AZ deployment runs resources across multiple Availability Zones so a workload survives the failure of one zone. SOA-C03 covers it for high availability and reliability.
- AWS Backup
- AWS Backup is a centralized service for automating and managing backups across AWS services with policy-based schedules. SOA-C03 covers it for backup, restore, and disaster recovery to meet RTO and RPO.
- Amazon EBS
- Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) is a service that provides persistent block storage volumes for EC2 instances, with snapshots for backup. SOA-C03 covers EBS volumes and snapshots in backup and reliability scenarios.
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code service that provisions AWS resources from templates, with stacks, stack sets, and drift detection. SOA-C03 covers it in the deployment, provisioning, and automation domain.
- AWS Systems Manager
- AWS Systems Manager is a service for operational management — Automation, Run Command, State Manager, Patch Manager, and Parameter Store. SOA-C03 covers it for automating repeatable operations.
- AWS KMS
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that creates and controls the cryptographic keys used to encrypt data. SOA-C03 covers it for data protection in the security and compliance domain.
- AWS Config
- AWS Config records resource configurations and evaluates them against rules for compliance. SOA-C03 covers it, with CloudTrail and Security Hub, for compliance auditing in the security and compliance domain.
- Security Group
- A security group is a stateful virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic for AWS resources such as EC2 instances. SOA-C03 covers security groups and NACLs in the networking and content delivery domain.
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon Route 53 is AWS's scalable DNS and domain service with routing policies and health checks. SOA-C03 covers it for DNS, routing, and health-check-based availability in the networking domain.
- VPC Flow Logs
- VPC Flow Logs capture metadata about IP traffic to and from network interfaces in a VPC. SOA-C03 covers them for troubleshooting connectivity and monitoring network traffic.