Exam at a glance
- Exam name: AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03)
- Level: Associate
- Questions: 65 total (50 scored + 15 unscored)
- Question types: multiple choice and multiple response
- Time: 130 minutes
- Delivery: Pearson VUE testing center or online proctored exam
- Result: scaled score (100-1000); minimum passing score: 720
- Cost: 150 USD
SOA-C03 is operations-first: monitoring signals, incident triage, remediation, reliability controls, and secure day-2 operations.
Unanswered questions are incorrect. There is no penalty for guessing.
Domain breakdown (weights)
- Domain 1: Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization - 22%
- Domain 2: Reliability and Business Continuity - 22%
- Domain 3: Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation - 22%
- Domain 4: Security and Compliance - 16%
- Domain 5: Networking and Content Delivery - 18%
What the exam emphasizes
Expect scenario-driven questions that test whether you can:
- monitor systems and interpret operational telemetry correctly
- identify root causes and apply the lowest-risk remediation
- implement HA, scaling, backup/restore, and DR procedures
- automate repetitive operations with AWS-native tooling
- enforce security/compliance controls while keeping workloads operable
- troubleshoot networking and content-delivery failures quickly
Who should take SOA-C03
This exam is a strong fit for:
- CloudOps/SRE/platform operations engineers running workloads on AWS
- system administrators transitioning into AWS operations roles
- engineers responsible for incident response and reliability operations
Recommended background (AWS guide):
- ~1 year of AWS deployment/management/troubleshooting/networking/security experience
- ~1 year in a related operations role
- practical familiarity with monitoring, logging, networking basics, and CLI/console operations
What is generally out of scope
- designing distributed architectures from scratch
- designing CI/CD pipelines
- designing hybrid and multi-VPC networking architectures
- software development
- defining governance requirements from zero
- capacity planning/TCO analysis and billing administration depth
Study focus order (fastest path)
- Domain 1 + Domain 2 first (44% total): monitoring/remediation + reliability/DR.
- Domain 3 next: CloudFormation, Systems Manager, event-driven automation.
- Domain 5 then Domain 4: network troubleshooting plus security/compliance controls.
- Final week: mixed sets + timed runs + miss-log review.
Continue with the Syllabus
for task-by-task prep.