SOA-C03 exam guide: format, domains, preparation
Who the exam is for
SOA-C03 is the exam code for the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate certification, formerly AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate. The certification page explains that the new name only applies to people who pass SOA-C03; it is not changed retroactively for existing SysOps Administrator holders.
The exam targets people who deploy, manage and operate workloads on AWS: monitoring and remediation, reliability and backups, automation, security controls and networking. The official exam guide describes a target candidate with 1 year of experience with deployment, management, troubleshooting, networking and security on AWS, and at least 1 year in a related operations role such as system administrator. Designing distributed architectures, CI/CD pipelines or hybrid and multi-VPC networking is listed as out of scope for the role.
Exam format
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Exam code | SOA-C03 |
| Duration | 130 minutes |
| Number of questions | 65 (50 scored, 15 unscored; the unscored questions are not identified) |
| Question types | Multiple choice (one correct response, three distractors) and multiple response (two or more correct responses out of five or more options) |
| Scoring | Scaled score from 100 to 1,000; compensatory model; no penalty for guessing |
| Passing score | 720 |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE test centre or online proctored exam |
| Languages | English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese; the certification page says the Simplified Chinese and Korean versions will be retired after November 19, 2026 |
| Exam guide version | Version 1.1, published June 1, 2026 (version 1.0: September 30, 2025) |
The compensatory model means you do not need to pass each domain separately: the overall score decides the result. Since a wrong answer costs nothing, never leave a question blank.
Domains and weights
The official content outline has five domains. Each domain is split into task statements.
| Domain | Weight | Task statements |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization | 22 % | 1.1 Metrics, alarms and filters; 1.2 Identify and remediate issues; 1.3 Performance optimization for compute, storage and database |
| 2. Reliability and Business Continuity | 22 % | 2.1 Scalability and elasticity; 2.2 Highly available and resilient environments; 2.3 Backup and restore strategies |
| 3. Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation | 22 % | 3.1 Provision and maintain cloud resources; 3.2 Automate the management of existing resources |
| 4. Security and Compliance | 16 % | 4.1 Security and compliance tools and policies; 4.2 Protect data and infrastructure |
| 5. Networking and Content Delivery | 18 % | 5.1 Networking features and connectivity; 5.2 Domains, DNS services and content delivery; 5.3 Troubleshoot network connectivity |
A few themes from the task statements, to give an idea of the breadth:
- Monitoring and remediation: CloudWatch metrics, alarms and dashboards, CloudTrail, EventBridge rules, Systems Manager Automation runbooks, and performance tuning of EC2, EBS, S3, EFS and RDS.
- Reliability: Auto Scaling, caching with CloudFront and ElastiCache, ELB and Route 53 health checks, Multi-AZ, AWS Backup, point-in-time recovery against RTO and RPO, and the disaster recovery strategies backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active.
- Deployment and automation: AMIs and EC2 Image Builder, CloudFormation and the AWS CDK, sharing across accounts and Regions with AWS RAM and StackSets, and Systems Manager for managing existing resources.
- Security: IAM policies, roles and federation, IAM Access Analyzer, Organizations and SCPs, IAM Identity Center, AWS Config, encryption with KMS and ACM, Secrets Manager, and findings from Security Hub, GuardDuty and Inspector.
- Networking: VPC subnets, route tables, network ACLs, security groups, NAT gateways, VPC endpoints and PrivateLink, Route 53 routing policies, CloudFront, and troubleshooting with VPC Flow Logs.
What changed recently
The exam guide keeps a revision history; AWS says revisions are published at least 1 month before changes are reflected on the exam. Read the current version rather than an older summary.
- Version 1.1 (June 1, 2026) added examples such as Kiro, AWS DevOps Agent and AWS Security Agent to several skills. Exam guide revisions
- Compared with SOA-C02, "Configure S3 static website hosting" was removed from task 5.2, and VPN content moved from task 4.2 to task 5.1. SOA-C02 and SOA-C03 comparison
- Route 53 VPC Resolver was previously called Route 53 Resolver; it was renamed when Route 53 Global Resolver was introduced. Route 53 VPC Resolver
- The RDS documentation now presents DB load monitoring under Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights. Database Insights on Amazon RDS
- Systems Manager Change Manager is no longer open to new customers starting November 7, 2025, and Incident Manager is no longer open to new customers. Change Manager · Incident Manager
- AWS CDK v1 ended support on June 1, 2023; use CDK v2 material. CDK bootstrapping
How to prepare
- Read the official certification page for current logistics, languages and booking options.
- Work through the official exam guide, domain by domain. For each skill, list the services it names and check that you can explain how to configure, monitor and fix them.
- Review the in-scope and out-of-scope service lists in the guide. Out-of-scope services can still appear as wrong options, so knowing what they do helps you rule them out.
- The first three domains carry the same weight (22 % each): split your time evenly between monitoring, reliability and automation, then networking and security.
- For each service, read the current product documentation, paying attention to the changes listed above.
- AWS also offers exam preparation for this exam on AWS Skill Builder.
- Practise under timed conditions with our SOA-C03 practice exam, then review weak areas question by question in the free study mode.
Our practice questions are single-answer multiple choice only; the exam also includes multiple response questions, so practise reading every option before deciding.
Practice Exam SOA-C03: AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (ex-SysOps)
25 free questions with explanations, no account needed.