AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) validates the ability to deploy, manage and operate workloads on AWS: monitoring, logging, analysis, remediation and performance optimization; reliability and business continuity; deployment, provisioning and automation; security and compliance; and networking and content delivery.
Exam format at a glance
| Format | 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored and unidentified) in 130 minutes, multiple choice and multiple response. Delivered at a Pearson VUE test centre or online with a proctor. |
| Cost | Approximately 150 USD, before regional pricing and taxes. |
| Scoring | Scored on a scaled 100–1000 range; 720 is the passing mark. AWS does not publish the exact question-to-scale conversion. |
| Validity | Valid for 3 years, then renewed by recertifying or by earning a higher-level AWS certification. |
Who this exam is for
- Systems administrators and cloud operations engineers who run and maintain AWS infrastructure day to day
- DevOps and SRE-track engineers who want the AWS credential most aligned with monitoring, automation and reliability work
- Solutions Architect Associate holders adding an operations-focused credential to round out their AWS certification profile
How to actually study for it
- Weight your study time by domain: Monitoring/Performance, Reliability and Deployment are 22% each, Networking 18% and Security 16%.
- Know CloudWatch cold — metrics, the CloudWatch agent (also on ECS and EKS), composite alarms, Logs Insights, cross-account dashboards — since monitoring is its own domain and threads through the rest of the exam.
- Be fluent in Systems Manager (Automation runbooks, Patch Manager, Session Manager, Parameter Store) and in CloudFormation, the CDK and StackSets — the exam leans on automation more than any other AWS associate exam.
- Practise reading operational scenarios for the actual failure mode described (a permissions error looks different from a capacity error, which looks different from a networking error) before jumping to a remediation.
Where to go next
Start with the free 10-question diagnostic to see where you actually stand, read 15 sample questions with answers, or go straight to the one-page SOA-C03 cheat sheet. The full SOA-C03 practice exam covers every domain at the real exam's weighting, with every answer explained.