Validate your ability to deploy, manage, and operate workloads on AWS. This exam covers monitoring, reliability, deployment automation, security compliance, and networking.
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Every CloudWatch alarm pattern, Systems Manager tool, DR strategy, and VPC diagnostic the SOA-C03 exam actually tests — organised the way operators work, not the way services are catalogued
The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate (SOA-C03), formerly the SysOps Administrator Associate, validates your ability to deploy, manage, and operate scalable, fault-tolerant systems on AWS. It's the most operations-focused of the three associate-level certifications.
This certification targets system administrators, operations engineers, cloud support engineers, and anyone responsible for day-to-day management of AWS workloads. If you're the person who gets paged when production breaks, this cert validates your skills. One year of hands-on AWS operations experience is recommended.
Read the full AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate certification guide
The SOA-C03 exam has 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored) in multiple-choice and multiple-response format. You get 130 minutes, and the passing score is 720/1000 (approximately 72%). The exam costs $150 USD.
Recommended experience: One year of hands-on experience operating and managing AWS-based systems, including monitoring, patching, backup, and access management.
Written in the style of the real exam. Answer each one, then open the answer to check.
Question 1 · Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization
A company's payment application runs on Amazon EC2 instances and sends its application logs to an Amazon CloudWatch Logs log group. A CloudOps engineer must be notified when the logs contain more than 10 entries with the text PAYMENT_DECLINED within any 5-minute period. Which solution will meet this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?
Answer: D
Option D is correct: a metric filter turns matching log events into a CloudWatch metric, and an alarm on that metric (Sum greater than 10 over a 5-minute period) can notify an Amazon SNS topic with no code to maintain. Option A works but requires the team to write and run custom counting code. Option B adds export jobs and query scheduling, and S3 exports are not designed for near real-time alerting. Option C also works but needs a scheduler, a Lambda function and custom alerting logic.
Sources: AWS documentation
Question 2 · Reliability and Business Continuity
A company stores critical documents in an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region. For disaster recovery, a CloudOps engineer must make sure that every new object is automatically copied to a bucket in the eu-west-1 Region. Which combination of actions will meet this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead? (Select TWO.)
Answers: B, E
Options B and E are correct: S3 Cross-Region Replication requires versioning on both buckets and a replication configuration on the source bucket that names an IAM role S3 can assume to read and write the objects. Option A speeds up client uploads over long distances but does not copy objects between buckets. Option C could copy objects, but it adds custom code to build, monitor and retry, which is more overhead than managed replication. Option D is not a requirement for replication; Object Lock is needed on the destination only when the source bucket already uses it.
Sources: AWS documentation 1, AWS documentation 2
Question 3 · Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation
A CloudOps engineer manages an AWS CloudFormation stack that contains an Amazon RDS DB instance and several application resources. Team members update the stack often. The engineer must prevent any stack update from replacing or deleting the DB instance, while still allowing updates to all other resources in the stack. Which solution will meet these requirements?
Answer: A
Option A is correct: a stack policy defines which update actions are allowed on which resources during every stack update, so denying Update:Replace and Update:Delete on the DB instance protects it while other resources remain updatable. Option B only prevents the whole stack from being deleted; it does not stop updates from replacing or removing resources. Option C blocks all stack updates, not only the ones that affect the database. Option D keeps the resource when it is removed from the stack or the stack is deleted, but an update that requires replacement still creates a new DB instance.
Sources: AWS documentation 1, AWS documentation 2
These sample questions are not part of the SOA-C03 practice exam, so you won't meet them again when you take it.
This practice exam has 65 questions, and exam mode gives you 130 minutes to answer them. The real SOA-C03 exam has 65 questions (50 scored and 15 unscored) in 130 minutes, so a full attempt here is the same length. Practice mode has no timer.
In format, yes: questions are multiple choice (one correct answer) or multiple response (two or more), spread across the 5 exam domains in close to the weights the official exam guide gives them. Scoring differs: AWS reports a scaled score from 100 to 1,000 and you pass at 720, while this practice exam shows the raw percentage you got right. For how hard the exam is, whether it is worth it and how long to study, read our AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate certification guide.
Aim for 80% or more, consistently, on full-length attempts in exam mode, not just once. That leaves a margin over the 720 out of 1,000 you need on the real SOA-C03 exam, whose questions will all be new to you. Repeat attempts here show the same questions, so judge yourself by first attempts and by whether you can explain each answer. No practice score guarantees a pass.
No. The SOA-C03 practice exam is free and needs no account. Your progress and score history are saved in this browser, so they stay on this device and are lost if you clear your browser data.
Start in practice mode, which tells you after each question whether you were right and explains the answer. When you score well there, switch to exam mode: 130 minutes and no feedback until the end, like test day. Your results break the score down by domain, so you can see which domains to study before your next attempt.
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