If you studied for the old AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate a few years back and are now looking at SOA-C03, do not assume it is the same test with a new label. AWS retired the SysOps Administrator name on September 30, 2025 and replaced it with CloudOps Engineer Associate, and the content shifted along with the title. The scored hands-on lab is gone. Amazon EKS and ECR are now in scope. Infrastructure as code coverage expanded beyond CloudFormation to include the AWS CDK. If your study material still says "SysOps Administrator" on the cover, check its publish date before you trust it.
SOA-C03 restructured its domains from the previous version, and three of the five now carry equal, heavy weight.
Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization, 22% — this single domain folds together what used to be split across separate sections. Expect deep coverage of CloudWatch metrics and alarms, CloudWatch Logs Insights queries, AWS Config for drift and compliance tracking, and automated remediation using EventBridge and Systems Manager.
Reliability and Business Continuity, 22% — Auto Scaling configuration, multi-AZ architecture, backup strategies with AWS Backup, and disaster recovery approaches ranging from simple backup and restore to warm standby.
Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation, 22% — building and managing AMIs and container images, CloudFormation and StackSets, the AWS CDK, and choosing appropriate deployment strategies for EC2, containers, and serverless workloads.
Networking and Content Delivery, 18% — VPC design, Route 53 DNS behavior, CloudFront, and troubleshooting connectivity issues across subnets, route tables, and security groups.
Security and Compliance, 16% — IAM policy troubleshooting, KMS, and applying least-privilege access patterns to operational tooling.
Three domains tied at 22% each means there is no single dominant topic to over-index on the way DevOps Engineer Professional leans on SDLC Automation. Your prep time needs to be genuinely spread across monitoring, reliability, and deployment automation rather than picking one favorite.
SOA-C03 targets people already doing the job, not people trying to break into it cold. AWS describes the target candidate as someone with roughly a year of hands-on experience operating AWS workloads: systems administrators who have moved into cloud roles, cloud support engineers, and cloud operations specialists who spend their days in the CloudWatch console and the AWS CLI rather than designing brand-new architectures. It sits well as a second certification for someone who already holds Solutions Architect Associate and wants to demonstrate the operational side of running what they design, rather than only the architecture side.
The official SOA-C03 exam runs 65 questions in 130 minutes, shorter than the old SOA-C02 format, and there is no separately scored lab section anymore. Scoring is on the familiar 100 to 1,000 scale, with a passing score of 720. The exam costs 150 USD and is offered at Pearson VUE test centers and through online proctoring. Questions are multiple choice and multiple response, and because the lab component was removed, everything you would have once demonstrated by clicking through a live console now has to be tested through a written scenario instead, which means the scenarios describing console and CLI behavior have gotten more detailed to compensate.
A common mistake is studying old SOA-C02 material and being caught off guard by container questions. Amazon EKS and ECR were explicitly out of scope on the previous version and are now testable, and candidates who skip container fundamentals because "SysOps was never about Kubernetes" walk in with a gap.
Another frequent slip is treating monitoring and troubleshooting as separate skills when the exam merges them into one domain. A question might describe a CloudWatch alarm that never triggered, and expect you to reason through the metric configuration, the alarm threshold, and the notification target all in one pass, rather than testing each piece in isolation the way older exams sometimes did.
Networking questions also trip up candidates who are strong on compute and storage but treat VPC troubleshooting as an afterthought. Route table misconfigurations, security group versus network ACL behavior, and DNS resolution issues inside a VPC show up as full scenario questions, not quick definitional ones.
Since the hands-on lab is gone, do your hands-on practice separately, before you touch the practice questions. Actually configure a CloudWatch alarm with a composite condition, actually set up an EventBridge rule that reacts to an AWS Config compliance change, and actually push a container image to ECR and deploy it to EKS. The exam is now testing whether you can reason correctly about console and CLI behavior you have seen with your own eyes, not behavior you have only read a description of Need additional preparation? Try our DEA-C01 practice exam mock test.
When you review practice questions, pay attention to which domain each question falls under and track your accuracy domain by domain rather than as a single overall percentage. Because three domains are tied at the top weighting, a weak spot in any one of Monitoring, Reliability, or Deployment costs you roughly the same amount of overall score, so there is no domain you can safely deprioritize.
Spend time in AWS Config and CloudTrail together, since SOA-C03 likes to test scenarios where you need to correlate a change event in CloudTrail with a compliance finding in Config to identify what happened and who did it. That correlation skill does not come from reading documentation, it comes from actually generating the events and watching them show up.
Build a small CI-style deployment using CodeDeploy or the CDK to an EC2 Auto Scaling group, then intentionally break something, like removing a health check, and watch how the deployment behaves. SOA-C03 scenario questions frequently describe a deployment that partially failed and ask what happened, and having watched a failure once makes those questions far easier to parse.
Do not skip networking because it feels like the smallest domain. At 18% it still represents more than one in six questions, and VPC troubleshooting scenarios are exactly the kind of content that is easy to under-practice because it feels less exciting than automation or monitoring.
Work through the practice set below, sort your results by the five domains listed above, and go back to hands-on practice for whichever domain is pulling your score down, rather than rereading notes for a domain you are already passing comfortably. Once you can consistently clear 720-equivalent scores across two or three full timed sets, you are in a position to book the exam.
Last updated on Oct, 9 2026
