Free exam guide: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate

This guide contains the notes that I created during the preparation for the AWS Certified Sysops Administrator Associate (SOA-C02) exam.

I’ve mostly used the content that was provided for free by AWS using their AWS Skillbuilder program, AWS Whitepapers, and the official AWS documentation.

I’ve curated the things that you should know for the exam, which means that the technical notes in this blog post are very dense and to the point.

If you wish to dive deeper, then you can always read further in the links that I’ve provided throughout the guide.

So let’s get started! Here are the detailed steps to help you pass the AWS SysOps certification exam.

Table of Contents

Who should take the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate exam?

According to AWS, they recommend you have the following experience and skills prior to taking the exam:

• At least 1-2 years of hands-on experience operating and maintaining different AWS Services.
• Know how to troubleshoot applications in AWS by using monitoring and logging.
• Understand how fundamental networking concepts such as DNS, TCP/IP, and firewalls.
• Ability to implement highly available and performant architectures in AWS.

How to prepare for the AWS SysOps Administrator Associate Certification exam

In this guide, we’ll follow the domains and topics that are provided in the content outline of the official AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Guide.

For each domain, we’ll let you know what AWS expects from you (knowledge-wise) and then I provide the technical notes that help you prepare and meet up these expectations.

Exam overview

This is what you can expect when you schedule the AWS certification exam:

• Consists of 50~65 multiple-choice, multiple-answer questions.
• New in this version is the exam labs, there can be 1~3 exam labs in which you need to actually do exercises in the AWS Console.
• The exam needs to be completed within 180 min (Note: follow this advice to permanently receive 30 minutes extra time for your AWS exams)
• Costs $150,-
• The minimum passing score is 720 points (max: 1000)

Content outline

The content outline of the exam consists of 6 separate domains, each with its own weighting.

The table below lists the domains with their weightings:

Amazon RDS

Performance insights expand on the existing RDS default monitoring metrics to help you analyze your RDS performance.

Performance Schema monitors events in MariaDB and MySQL databases. An event is a database server action that consumes time and has been instrumented so that timing information can be collected. Examples of events include the following:

• Function calls
• Waits for the operating system
• Stages of SQL execution
• Groups of SQL statements

Enhanced Monitoring provides additional metrics for the DB instance’s Operating Systems (OS) your RDS runs on.

Amazon Eventbridge

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from your own applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services.

Here are some notable features that are worth knowing for the exam:

• Event bus – That’s a pipeline that receives events. This can be an event from another AWS service or from your own application. You can attach an event pattern to it and apply rules to dictate what the event bus should do with the message.
• Event pattern – You create a pattern (JSON) that you want to match against an existing event (AWS event or custom event). In case of a match, it will send the message to a designated target.
• Rules – You can run a rule on a schedule or with an event pattern and attach it to the event bus.
• Targets – A target is where an event is sent when it matches the event pattern of the rule. This can be an AWS resource e.g. AWS Lambda or external API.

AWS Systems Manager Automation

You can include an AWS SSM automation document in an AWS Config rule to remediate a non-compliant resource.

There are over hundred documents that are shared by Amazon that can be used to remediate issues such as starting an RDS instance or deleting unused EBS volumes.

Domain 2: Reliability and Business Continuity – 16%

You should be comfortable knowing the following in this domain:

• Implement scalability and elasticity by using AWS Elasticache, using read replicas on RDS.
• Implement high availability and resilient environments by knowing how Amazon Route 53 health checks work including their routing policies.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 allows you to create DNS records, such as A, AAAA, MX, and CNAME records, and to configure routing policies that determine how requests are routed to your resources.

Amazon Route 53 health checks

A health check can be performed on a variety of resources, including but not limited to:

• Endpoints – a health check pinging a server on a specific IP address and/or port.
• URLs – a health check sending an HTTP or HTTPS request to a specific page on a domain/subdomain.
• Cloudwatch Alarms – a health check checking the status of a CloudWatch alarm.
• ECS Services and ELBs – a health check checking the number of healthy instances of an ECS service or ELB target group.

You can configure the settings for each health check, such as the interval at which the check should be performed and the number of consecutive failures that should occur before marking a resource as unhealthy.

Health checks can be associated with a record set. For example, if a domain name’s resource is unhealthy, then Route 53 can stop routing traffic to that endpoint and route to another endpoint.

Amazon Elasticache

There are two types of storage options for Amazon Elasticache. Option 1 is to use Memcache to cache data for your application if:

• You want the simplest model possible
• You need to run large nodes with multiple cores or threads
• Need the ability to scale out
• Shard data across multiple nodes
• Need to cache objects such as a database

Option 2 is to use Redis for your application if:

• You need complex data types such as strings, hashes, lists, and sets
• Need to sort or rank in-memory datasets
• Want persistence of your key store
• replicate data from primary to read replicas for availability
• need automatic failover if any of your primary nodes fail
• You want publish- and subscribe capabilities
• backup and restore capabilities

Domain 3: Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation – 18%

You should be comfortable knowing the following in this domain:

• Provision and maintain AWS resources by using Infrastructure as Code tools such as AWS CloudFormation.
• Be able to differentiate between several deployment strategies e.g. blue/green- or rolling deployments.

In my AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional exam guide, I expand further on these deployment strategies and AWS CloudFormation foundations. Nonetheless, I’ve shared small bits down below.

Deployment strategies

For services like AWS CodeDeploy, CloudFormation, AWS Beanstalk, and AWS OpsWorks you can apply several deployment strategies. Each has its pros and cons.

The cheat sheet below shows the types of deployments and shows how well they rank on these columns: impact, deployment time, zero downtime, rollback process, and deploy target.

AWS CloudFormation

• Infrastructure as code and templates are in Yaml or JSON format
• Version control/replicate/update templates like code
• Integrated with CI/CD tools
• Run automated testing for CI/CD environments

AWS CloudFormation template anatomy:

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: "version date" Description: String Metadata: template metadata Parameters: set of parameters Rules: set of rules Mappings: set of mappings Conditions: set of conditions Transform: set of transforms Resources: set of resources Outputs: set of outputs

Here’s an overview of the different types of CloudFormation stack updates: