This blog will walk you through everything about the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 exam’s overview, learning outcomes, how it helps your career, prior requirements, the syllabus, materials, preparation strategies, and so on.
Overview of the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Certification
The SOA-C02: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate certification is one of the industry-relevant skills and a specialized course for system administrators working in cloud operations. It certainly validates your knowledge of implementing, handling, and running workloads on AWS infrastructure. The exam tests your ability to perform tasks like
- Maintain and support AWS workloads by the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
- Utilize the AWS Management Console and AWS CLI to carry out activities.
- Put security controls in place to comply with compliance requirements
- System monitoring, logging, and troubleshooting
- Apply networking concepts (such as DNS, TCP/IP, and firewalls).
- Implement architectural specifications (such as high availability, performance, and capacity)
- Adopt catastrophe recovery and business continuity measures
- Identify, categorize, and address incidents
Exam domains for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate certification
The SOA-C02 certification exam captures 6 domains and has a specific weight in the cert exam. Here’s a quick view of the exam breakup:
- Monitoring, Remediation, and Logging
- Business Continuity and Reliability
- Provisioning, Implementation, and Automation
- Security and governance
- Content delivery and networking
- Troubleshooting and monitoring
Preparation Tips for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Exam
The SOA-C02 exam is a challenging one to get through. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ace it. With proper strategy and accurate schedules, you can make all phases of prep a breeze. Here are a few quick steps you can follow:
- Download the AWS SOA-C02 exam guide to delve deeper into the exam objectives and domains.
- Allot equal hours and days to all domains and topics. Treat all parts of the syllabus equally and don’t leave anything behind.
- The exam requires candidates to have hands-on experience with IT, AWS technologies, cloud administration, and system operations. If you don’t have the required practical exposure, ensure you have all the skills up your sleeve before applying.
- Similarly, ensure you are at least familiar with all the out-of-scope skills. You can begin with AWS FAQs and whitepapers to delve deeper into those topics.
You can skim through whitepapers and FAQs for AWS fundamentals and architecture, covering:
- AWS Well-Architected Framework
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Connectivity Options
- How AWS Pricing Works
- Amazon SQS
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon S3
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon VPC
- Amazon Route 53
Finally, you have the AWS exam review section for the last phase of your preparation strategy.
- Once you are done with all the theoretical and practical prep, it’s time to put your skills into practice. Go through AWS sample papers and official practice questions to assess your preparation so far. Note and fill in the gaps, and then re-attempt the questions.
- The key is to choose the right resources that give you clarity with the exam syllabus and, ultimately, your test-taking abilities.
Once you see a satisfying accuracy on your practice tests, register for the SOA-C02 exam and ace it.
What skills will you learn from the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate certification?
The SOA-C02 certification imparts countless skills that you would need to perform daily as an AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate. Preparing for this certification will help you learn:
- How to implement, manage, and run workloads on AWS while deploying security controls and compliance needs.
- Using AWS Command Line Interface and AWS Management Console.
- AWS networking and security services
- AWS Well-Architected Framework.
Additionally, like all other AWS certifications, SOA-C02 categorizes the learning outcomes into two baskets: concepts, tools, and technologies falling within the scope of the cert exam and some out-of-scope AWS features and services.
The general scope of AWS concepts covered in the SOA-C02 exam:
AWS Cost Management:
- AWS Cost and Usage Report
- Savings Plans
- AWS Cost Explorer
Application Integration:
- Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events)
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
Analytics:
- Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES)
Compute:
- AWS Application Auto Scaling
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon EC2 Image Builder
AWS Cost Management:
- AWS Cost and Usage Report
- Savings Plans
- AWS Cost Explorer
Storage:
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Amazon FSx
- Amazon S3 Glacier
- AWS Storage Gateway
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
- Amazon S3
- AWS Backup
Security, Identity, and Compliance:
- AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
- AWS Directory Service
- AWS IAM Access Analyzer
- Amazon Inspector
- Amazon Detective
- Amazon GuardDuty
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Out-of-Scope AWS Services and Features
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon Chime
- AWS CodeBuild
- AWS CodeStar
- AWS Device Farm
- Amazon Connect
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
- Amazon Elastic Transcoder
- AWS IoT Button
- Amazon Kinesis
- Amazon Lumberyard
- AWS IoT Greengrass
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Why should you go for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate exam?
There are a million reasons to take the SOA-C02 exam. To begin with, an AWS Certified SysOps Administrator is one of the highest-paying jobs across industries. Unlike other certificate courses that focus mostly on single-service tools or technologies like MySQL, this AWS certificate covers numerous services and features to help you strengthen your foundation.
It also allows you to become well-versed in storage, networking, and security aspects of cloud environments.
Additionally, an AWS Certified SysOps Administrator can hike their salary by around USD 48,000 to USD 127,000 p.a. Some of the other benefits of the SOA-C02 course include
- Building fault-tolerant systems on AWS.
- Manage data inflows and outflows in AWS.
- Handle workload migration into the AWS cloud.
- Specialty-level cert helps you learn AWS a lot faster.
- It saves you from mugging countless docs while helping you learn advanced tricks in deploying quicker AWS solutions and solving business problems in real time.
FAQs
How long is the validity of the SOA-C02 certification?
The SOA-C02 cert is valid for three years.
How does the SOA-C02 cert benefit an IT administrator?
The professionals specializing in administration profiles are responsible for the operations, implementation, and monitoring of the systems. The AWS SOA-C02 certification verifies administrators’ abilities to set up, run, and monitor adaptable, reliable, and available systems on the AWS platform.
How can I best prepare for the AWS SysOps Administrator exam?
While preparing for the AWS SysOps Administrator exam, you can rely upon the exam study guide, take training courses, do hands-on labs, sample questions, do sandbox training, and stay updated with AWS announcements. This preparation strategy can help you ace the exam with flying colors.
Conclusion
This SOA-C02 preparation guide has given you a better understanding of the exam domain, exam skills, and some more ideas of where to get training for the SOA-C02 certification that you can implement today. As discussed, learning with practice tests, video courses, Hands-on labs, and Sandboxes to experiment with and experience the AWS environment will take you places in your preparation. Feel free to contact us in case of queries!
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