SysOps

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) Exam Learning Path

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 52 Comments

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) exam is the latest AWS exam and has already replaced the old SysOps Administrator – Associate exam from 24th Sept 2018. It basically validates

  • Deploy, manage, and operate scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS
  • Implement and control the flow of data to and from AWS
  • Select the appropriate AWS service based on compute, data, or security requirements
  • Identify appropriate use of AWS operational best practices
  • Estimate AWS usage costs and identify operational cost control mechanisms
  • Migrate on-premises workloads to AWS

Refer AWS Certified SysOps – Associate Exam Guide Sep 18

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate Content Outline

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) Exam Summary

  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam is quite different from the previous one with more focus on the error handling, deployment, monitoring.
  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam covers a lot of latest AWS services like ALB, Lambda, AWS Config, AWS Inspector, AWS Shield while focusing majorly on other services like CloudWatch, Metrics from various services, CloudTrail.
  • Be sure to cover the following topics
    •  Monitoring & Management Tools
      • Understand CloudWatch monitoring to provide operational transparency
        • Know which EC2 metrics it can track (disk, network, CPU, status checks) and which would need custom metrics (memory, disk swap, disk storage etc.)
        • Know ELB monitoring
          • Classic Load Balancer metrics SurgeQueueLength and SpilloverCount
          • Reasons for 4XX and 5XX errors
      • Understand CloudTrail for audit and governance
      • Understand AWS Config and its use cases
      • Understand AWS Systems Manager and its various services like parameter store, patch manager
      • Understand AWS Trusted Advisor and what it provides
      • Very important to understand AWS CloudWatch vs AWS CloudTrail vs AWS Config
      • Very important to understand Trust Advisor vs Systems manager vs Inspector
      • Know Personal Health Dashboard & Service Health Dashboard
      • Deployment tools
        • Know AWS OpsWorks and its ability to support chef & puppet
        • Know Elastic Beanstalk and its advantages
        • Understand AWS CloudFormation
          • Know stacks, templates, nested stacks
          • Know how to wait for resources setup to be completed before proceeding esp. cfn-signal
          • Know how to retain resources (RDS, S3), prevent rollback in case of a failure
    • Networking & Content Delivery
      • Understand VPC in depth
        • Understand the difference between
          • Bastion host – allow access to instances in private subnet
          • NAT – route traffic from private subnets to internet
          • NAT instance vs NAT Gateway
          • Internet Gateway – Access to internet
          • Virtual Private Gateway – Connectivity between on-premises and VPC
          • Egress-Only Internet Gateway – relevant to IPv6 only to allow egress traffic from private subnet to internet, without allowing ingress traffic
        • Understand
        • Understand how VPC Peering works and limitations
        • Understand VPC Endpoints and supported services
        • Ability to debug networking issues like EC2 not accessible, EC2 instances not reachable, Instances in subnets not able to communicate with others or Internet.
      • Understand Route 53 and Routing Policies and their use cases
        • Focus on Weighted, Latency routing policies
      • Understand VPN and Direct Connect and their use cases
      • Understand CloudFront and use cases
      • Understand ELB, ALB and NLB and what features they provide like
        • ALB provides content and path routing
        • NLB provides ability to give static IPs to load balancer.
    • Compute
      • Understand EC2 in depth
        • Understand EC2 instance types
        • Understand EC2 purchase options esp. spot instances and improved reserved instances options.
        • Understand how IO Credits work and T2 burstable performance and T2 unlimited
        • Understand EC2 Metadata & Userdata. Whats the use of each? How to look up instance data after it is launched.
        • Understand EC2 Security. 
          • How IAM Role work with EC2 instances
          • IAM Role can now be attached to stopped and runnings instances
        • Understand AMIs and remember they are regional and how can they be shared with others.
        • Troubleshoot issues with launching EC2 esp. RequestLimitExceeded, InstanceLimitExceeded etc.
        • Troubleshoot connectivity, lost ssh keys issues
      • Understand Auto Scaling
      • Understand Lambda and its use cases
      • Understand Lambda with API Gateway
    • Storage
    • Databases
    • Security
      • Understand IAM as a whole
      • Understand KMS for key management and envelope encryption
      • Understand CloudHSM and KMS vs CloudHSM esp. support for symmetric and asymmetric keys
      • Know AWS Inspector and its use cases
      • Know AWS GuardDuty as managed threat detection service. Will help eliminate as the option
      • Know AWS Shield esp. the Shield Advanced option and the features it provides
      • Know WAF as Web Traffic Firewall
      • Know AWS Artifact as on-demand access to compliance reports
    • Integration Tools
      • Understand SQS as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
        • Focus on SQS as a decoupling service
        • Understand SQS FIFO, make sure you know the differences between standard and FIFO
      • Understand CloudWatch integration with SNS for notification
    • Cost management

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) Exam Resources

AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) Exam Contents

Domain 1: Monitoring and Reporting

  1. Create and maintain metrics and alarms utilizing AWS monitoring services
  1. Recognize and differentiate performance and availability metrics
  2. Perform the steps necessary to remediate based on performance and availability metrics

Domain 2: High Availability

  1. Implement scalability and elasticity based on use case
  2. Recognize and differentiate highly available and resilient environments on AWS

Domain 3: Deployment and Provisioning

  1. Identify and execute steps required to provision cloud resources
  2. Identify and remediate deployment issues

Domain 4: Storage and Data Management

  1. Create and manage data retention
  2. Identify and implement data protection, encryption, and capacity planning needs

Domain 5: Security and Compliance

  1. Implement and manage security policies on AWS
  1. Implement access controls when using AWS
  2. Differentiate between the roles and responsibility within the shared responsibility model

Domain 6: Networking

  1. Apply AWS networking features
  1. Implement connectivity services of AWS
  2. Gather and interpret relevant information for network troubleshooting

Domain 7: Automation and Optimization

  1. Use AWS services and features to manage and assess resource utilization
  2. Employ cost-optimization strategies for efficient resource utilization
  3. Automate manual or repeatable process to minimize management overhead

AWS Associate Certification Exams – Preparation – Sample Questions

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 181 Comments

AWS Solution Architect & SysOps Associate Certification Exams Preparation & Sample Questions

I recently passed AWS Solution Architect – Associate (90%) & SysOps – Associate (81%) certification exams.

I would like to share my preparation leading to and experience for the exams

  • AWS Certification exams are pretty tough to crack as they cover a lot of topics from a wide range of services offered by them.
  • I cleared both the Solution Architect and SysOps Associate certifications in a time frame of 2 months.
  • I had 6 months of prior hands-on experience with AWS primarily on IAM, VPC, EC2, S3 & RDS which helped a lot
  • There are lot of resources online which can be helpful but are overwhelming as well as misguide you (I found lot of dumps which have sample exam questions but the answers are marked wrong)
  • AWS Associate certifications although can be cleared with complete theoretical knowledge, a bit of hands on really helps a lot.
  • Also, AWS services are update literally everyday with new features being added, issues resolved and so on, which the exam questions surely don’t keep a track off. Not sure how often the exam questions are updated.
  • So my suggestion is if you see a question which focuses on a scenario which added latest by AWS within a month, still don’t go with that answer and stick to the answer which was relevant before the update for e.g. encryption of Root volume usually made in the certification exam with options to use external tools and was enabled by AWS recently.

AWS Certification Exam Preparation

As I mentioned there are lot of resources and courses online for the Certification exam which can be overwhelming, this is what I did for my preparation to clear the exams

    • Went through AWS Certification Preparation guide
    • Went through the AWS Solution Architect & SysOps blue print thoroughly as it mentions the topics and the weightage in the exam
    • Purchased the acloud guru course from udemy (got it for $10 on discount) for both the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate 2017 and AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate 2017 course, which greatly helped to have a clear picture of the the format, topics and relevant sections
    • Signed up with AWS for the Free Tier account which provides a lot of the Services to be tried for free with certain limits which are more then enough to get things going. Be sure to decommission anything, if you using any thing beyond the free limits, preventing any surprises 🙂
    • Also, used the QwikLabs for all the introductory courses which are free and allow you to try out the services multiple times (I think its max 5, as I got the warnings couple of times)
    • Update: Qwiklabs seems to have reduced the free courses quite a lot and now provide targeted labs for AWS Certification exams which are charged
    • Went through the few Whitepapers especially the
    • Read the FAQs atleast for the important topics, as they cover important points and are good for quick review
    • Went through multiple sites to consolidate the Sample exam questions and worked on them to get the correct answers. I have tried to consolidate them further in this blog topic wise.
    • Went through multiple discussion topics on the acloud guru course which are pretty interesting and provides further insights and some of them are actually certification exam questions
    • I did not purchase the AWS Practice exams, as the questions are available all around. But if you want to check the format, it might be useful.
    • Opinion : acloud guru course are good by itself but is not sufficient to pass the exam but might help to counter about 50-60% of exam questions
    • Also, if you are well prepared the time for the certification exam is more then enough and I could answer all the questions within an hour and was able to run a review on all them once.
    • Important Exam Time Tip: Only mark the questions which you doubt as Mark for Review and then go through them only. I did the mistake marking quite a few as Mark for Review, even though I was confident on the answers, and wasting time on them again.
    • You can also check on

Braincert-AWS-Certified-SA-Professional-Practice-Exam

Udemy AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate Practice Tests

AWS Associate Certification Exam Important Topics