AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C02)
Deploy, manage, and operate scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant systems on AWS, implement cost controls, manage security and compliance policies, and automate operational workflows.
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The SOA-C02 exam consists of 65 multiple-choice, multiple-response, and scenario questions over 130 minutes. Registration costs $150 USD, with a passing score of 720/1000 (72%).
Domains include: (1) Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation (~20%), (2) Reliability and Business Continuity (~16%), (3) Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation (~18%), (4) Security and Compliance (~16%), (5) Networking and Content Delivery (~18%), and (6) Cost and Performance Optimization (~12%).
CloudWatch alarms monitor operational metrics and automatically execute actions like Auto Scaling policies, Amazon EC2 reboot/recover actions, or publishing to SNS topics to trigger Lambda functions.
Session Manager provides secure and auditable instance management over HTTPS without opening inbound ports (SSH port 22 or RDP port 3389), maintaining bastion hosts, or managing SSH keys.
Patch Manager automates operating system patching across EC2 and on-premises instances against predefined patch baselines. State Manager maintains consistent OS configurations (antivirus, agents) across instances.
CloudFormation drift detection compares the current resource property configurations against the declared template definition, reporting discrepancies and enabling corrective template updates.
EventBridge is a serverless event bus that ingests operational event changes (such as EC2 state changes or GuardDuty findings) and routes them to targets like Lambda or Systems Manager Automation.
Metric filters scan incoming log streams for specific terms or patterns (e.g. 'HTTP 500' or 'AccessDenied') and transform matches into numerical CloudWatch metrics for alerting.
AWS Health provides personalized information about AWS service disruptions, planned infrastructure maintenance, and resource health degradation impacting your specific AWS accounts.
AWS Backup centralizes policy-based automated backup scheduling, cross-account and cross-region copying, and retention management across EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, EFS, and S3.
The SOA-C02 certification is valid for three years from the date earned and can be renewed by retaking the exam or passing the DevOps Professional (DOP-C02) exam.
SOA-C02 certifies Cloud Operations Administrators, Systems Reliability Engineers (SREs), and Infrastructure Specialists earning average US salaries between $120,000 and $155,000.