AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02

Exam Domains

Six Core SysOps Domains

SOA-C02 validates operational skills across monitoring, reliability, deployment automation, security, networking, and cost and performance management on AWS.

Domain 01

Monitoring, Logging & Remediation

20%

exam weight

›CloudWatch metrics, alarms, dashboards, and Contributor Insights
›CloudWatch Logs, Logs Insights, and metric filters for security and operations
›CloudWatch agent for custom EC2 and on-premises metrics collection
›Configure SNS notifications, EventBridge rules, and automated remediation with Lambda
›Systems Manager OpsCenter for incident tracking and runbook-based resolution

Domain 02

Reliability & Business Continuity

16%

exam weight

›EC2 Auto Scaling — target tracking, step, scheduled, and predictive policies
›ELB health checks and connection draining for graceful instance replacement
›Multi-AZ vs single-AZ — RDS, EFS, ElastiCache, and EC2 Auto Scaling group design
›AWS Backup — backup plans, vaults, copy across Regions, and restore testing
›Disaster recovery — snapshot automation, cross-Region replication, and Route 53 failover

Domain 03

Deployment, Provisioning & Automation

18%

exam weight

›AWS CloudFormation — template authoring, change sets, drift detection, and StackSets
›EC2 Image Builder for golden AMI pipelines with automated patching and scanning
›Systems Manager Patch Manager for automated OS patching across EC2 fleet
›Deployment strategies — blue/green, rolling, canary with CodeDeploy and Elastic Beanstalk
›Systems Manager Automation for self-healing and scheduled operational runbooks

Domain 04

Security & Compliance

16%

exam weight

›IAM — password policies, MFA enforcement, roles, SAML federation, and SCPs
›AWS Config rules — managed and custom rules, conformance packs, and auto-remediation
›AWS Trusted Advisor security checks and Service Quotas monitoring
›Encryption — KMS key management, EBS and S3 encryption, and Secrets Manager
›GuardDuty, Inspector, and Security Hub for multi-account security visibility

Domain 05

Networking & Content Delivery

18%

exam weight

›VPC configuration — subnets, route tables, internet/NAT gateways, and security groups
›Route 53 routing policies — failover, weighted, latency, geolocation, and multivalue
›Amazon CloudFront — distributions, cache behaviors, OAC, and SSL/TLS certificates
›VPC private connectivity — Session Manager, VPC endpoints, VPN, and peering
›Diagnose network issues — VPC Reachability Analyzer, Flow Logs, and WAF logs

Domain 06

Cost & Performance Optimization

12%

exam weight

›Implement cost allocation tags and attribute costs to teams, projects, and environments
›AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection for proactive cost management
›AWS Compute Optimizer for EC2, Lambda, ECS, and EBS rightsizing recommendations
›Spot Instances — qualification criteria, Spot Fleet, and interruption handling strategies
›Performance monitoring — EBS IOPS, RDS Performance Insights, and S3 Transfer Acceleration

Why SOA-C02

The Essential AWS Operations Certification

Cloud operations is the discipline that keeps production AWS workloads healthy, secure, and cost-efficient. SOA-C02 proves you have the hands-on skills to monitor, maintain, and automate AWS environments.

Associate Tier — Cloud Operations Track

SOA-C02 is ideal for systems administrators and operations engineers who work with production AWS environments daily. It is a prerequisite for DOP-C02 (DevOps Professional) certification.

Observability Is Foundational

CloudWatch is at the heart of every AWS operations role. SOA-C02 validates deep skills in metrics, alarms, dashboards, and log analysis — the core of production monitoring.

Automation Reduces Toil

Systems Manager Automation, CloudFormation, and EventBridge rules eliminate manual operations. SOA-C02 proves you can build self-healing, automated cloud systems.

Operations Without Security Is Incomplete

IAM, Config rules, GuardDuty, and Secrets Manager are core exam topics. SOA-C02 ensures operations engineers understand and enforce the security posture of AWS workloads.

Networking Problems Are Frequent

VPC Flow Logs, Route 53 health checks, and CloudFront troubleshooting are tested hands-on. SOA-C02 validates the ability to diagnose and resolve production network issues quickly.

Gateway to DevOps Professional

SOA-C02 is the recommended prerequisite for DOP-C02 (DevOps Professional) — the highest AWS operations certification. It opens roles in SRE, platform engineering, and cloud ops.

Curriculum

14-Topic SOA-C02 Programme

Complete SysOps curriculum covering monitoring, reliability, automation, security, networking, and cost optimization for production AWS environments.

Identify, collect, analyze, and export logs — CloudWatch Logs, Logs Insights, CloudTrail
Collect metrics and logs with the CloudWatch unified agent for EC2 and on-premises
Create CloudWatch alarms — static and anomaly detection thresholds, composite alarms
Create metric filters for security and operational patterns in CloudWatch Logs
Configure SNS notifications, CloudWatch alarms, and Service Quotas health event alerts

Troubleshoot and take corrective actions based on CloudWatch alarms and SNS notifications
Configure EventBridge rules to trigger Lambda, SNS, SQS, and Systems Manager Automation
Use Systems Manager Automation runbooks to auto-remediate AWS Config rule violations
OpsCenter integration — create OpsItems from CloudWatch Alarms and Config findings
CloudWatch Contributor Insights for identifying high-impact resources in operational issues

Create and maintain AWS Auto Scaling plans with target tracking and step scaling policies
Implement application-layer caching — ElastiCache, CloudFront, API Gateway stage caching
Implement RDS read replicas and Aurora Replicas for horizontal read scaling
Implement loosely coupled architectures — SQS queues, SNS topics, and EventBridge
Horizontal vs vertical scaling — when to scale out vs scale up for different workloads

Configure Elastic Load Balancing — ALB, NLB, health checks, and connection draining
Multi-AZ vs single-AZ — EC2 Auto Scaling, RDS Multi-AZ, EFS, and ElastiCache cluster mode
Implement fault-tolerant workloads — EFS across AZs, Elastic IP, and instance recovery
Route 53 routing policies — failover, weighted, latency-based, and geolocation routing
Sticky sessions, cross-zone load balancing, and pre-warming for high-traffic events

AWS Backup — backup plans, vaults, cross-Region copy, and compliance reports
Automate snapshots — RDS automated backups, EBS lifecycle manager, EC2 AMI automation
Restore databases — RDS point-in-time restore, snapshot restore, and read replica promotion
S3 versioning, lifecycle rules, and Cross-Region Replication for object durability
Disaster recovery procedures — pilot light, warm standby, and multi-Region failover

EC2 Image Builder — image pipelines, recipes, components, and distribution settings
Create and manage CloudFormation stacks — templates, parameters, outputs, and conditions
CloudFormation StackSets for multi-account and multi-Region resource provisioning
Select deployment scenarios — blue/green, rolling, canary, all-at-once with CodeDeploy
Identify and remediate deployment issues — quotas, subnet sizing, and permission errors

Systems Manager Run Command for remote command execution without SSH/RDP
Systems Manager Patch Manager — patch baselines, patch groups, and maintenance windows
Schedule automated tasks — EventBridge schedules, Systems Manager Maintenance Windows
CloudFormation drift detection and automatic remediation with Config Rules and Lambda
Systems Manager Parameter Store for configuration management and secret injection

IAM password policies, MFA enforcement, and access key rotation policies
Troubleshoot access issues — CloudTrail, IAM Access Advisor, and policy simulator
Validate SCPs and permission boundaries for multi-account security governance
AWS Trusted Advisor security checks — exposed keys, unrestricted ports, and MFA
Implement secure multi-account strategies — Control Tower, Organizations, and AWS SSO

Enforce data classification — S3 bucket policies, Macie, and access control lists
Create, manage, and rotate KMS customer managed keys and key policies
Encryption at rest — EBS, RDS, S3, EFS, and Secrets Manager with KMS
Encryption in transit — ACM certificates, TLS, and HTTPS endpoint configuration
Review security findings — GuardDuty, Security Hub, Config, and Inspector reports

Configure VPC — subnets, route tables, internet gateway, NAT gateway, and DHCP options
Configure private connectivity — Session Manager (no bastion), VPC endpoints, VPN, peering
Configure AWS Network Firewall and WAF for inbound traffic inspection and filtering
Diagnose VPC connectivity — Reachability Analyzer, Flow Logs, and route table analysis
VPC Flow Logs configuration — S3 and CloudWatch Logs destinations, and query patterns

Route 53 hosted zones — public and private zones, record types, and alias records
Route 53 routing policies — simple, failover, weighted, latency, geolocation, geoproximity
Configure Route 53 Resolver — inbound endpoints, outbound rules, and DNS Firewall
CloudFront distributions — origin access control, cache behaviors, TTL, and invalidation
S3 static website hosting, bucket policies, and CORS for web application delivery

Interpret VPC configurations — route table conflicts, security group ordering, and NACLs
Collect and interpret logs — VPC Flow Logs, ELB access logs, WAF logs, and CloudFront logs
Identify and remediate CloudFront cache issues — cache hit ratio, TTL, and origin errors
Troubleshoot hybrid and private connectivity — VPN tunnel state, BGP, and Direct Connect
Route 53 DNS health check failures — endpoint health, latency thresholds, and string match

Implement cost allocation tags and enforce tagging with Config rules and SCPs
Identify and remediate unused resources — Trusted Advisor, Compute Optimizer, Cost Explorer
Configure AWS Budgets — cost, usage, reservation, and Savings Plans coverage budgets
Qualify workloads for Spot Instances — interruption tolerance, checkpointing, and diversification
Identify managed service opportunities — RDS vs EC2 database, Fargate vs EC2 container costs

EC2 performance — ENA, SR-IOV, placement groups, and instance storage vs EBS
EBS performance — gp3 baseline IOPS, Provisioned IOPS (io2), and throughput optimization
S3 performance — multipart upload, S3 Transfer Acceleration, and request rate optimization
RDS performance — Performance Insights, slow query logs, read replicas, and RDS Proxy
EC2 enhanced networking — Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)

Course Snapshot

14 Topics

Full SOA-C02 domains

38+ Hours

Total learning time

Associate Cert

SysOps level

Tech Support

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Mon–Fri

9 AM – 6 PM

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Career Outcomes

SOA-C02 Careers in Cloud Operations

Cloud operations roles are in high demand globally. SOA-C02 positions you for SysOps, platform engineering, SRE, and DevOps roles that keep production AWS environments running reliably.

Infosys

Cloud Ops Eng.

TCS

AWS SysOps

Wipro

Platform Eng.

Accenture

Cloud SRE

SysOps Administrator

Monitor, maintain, and automate AWS workloads — managing EC2 fleets, CloudFormation stacks, Systems Manager, and CloudWatch to ensure production availability and performance.

₹8–22 LPA

Cloud Platform Engineer

Build and maintain the cloud platform layer — IAM, networking, monitoring, and IaC tooling — enabling engineering teams to deploy applications reliably and efficiently.

₹10–26 LPA

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Apply SRE principles — SLOs, error budgets, and toil reduction — to AWS workloads, using CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and automated runbooks to maintain high reliability.

₹12–30 LPA

DevOps Engineer

Combine SOA-C02 operations skills with CI/CD expertise to automate deployment pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, and operational monitoring across AWS accounts.

₹10–28 LPA

Cloud Security Operations

Implement and monitor security controls — Config rules, GuardDuty, and IAM policies — as part of a cloud security operations function protecting production AWS environments.

₹10–26 LPA

Topics

38+ hrs

Training Hours

Associate

Cert Level

SOA-C02

AWS Certified

SysOps Administrator

Associate SOA-C02

Six Core SysOps Domains

The Essential AWS Operations Certification

14-Topic SOA-C02 Programme

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SOA-C02 Careers in Cloud Operations

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