AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02)

The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) is a certification provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) intended for individuals who perform a systems operations (SysOps) administrator role with at least one year of experience in deployment, management, and operations on AWS.

This certification exam generally covers the following domains:

1. Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation: 20%
2. Reliability and Business Continuity: 16%
3. Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation: 18%
4. Security and Compliance: 16%
5. Networking and Content Delivery: 18%
6. Cost and Performance Optimization: 12%

Here’s a brief description of each domain:

1. Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation: This domain involves implementing, managing, and analyzing logs, metrics, and monitoring, and executing remediation procedures.
2. Reliability and Business Continuity: Here, you need to understand and implement high availability, fault tolerance, and backup and restore strategies.
3. Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation: This domain tests your ability to implement pre-approved changes, deploy applications to the AWS environment, and automate manual or repeatable processes.
4. Security and Compliance: You’re required to understand and implement security and compliance controls, and validate your environment against those controls.
5. Networking and Content Delivery: This domain covers implementation and management of secure and scalable network infrastructure.
6. Cost and Performance Optimization: In this domain, you’re tested on your ability to implement cost optimization strategies and managing system performance.

The certification process involves a multiple-choice, multiple-answer exam, which can be taken at a testing center or via an online proctored exam from your home or office.

It’s recommended that candidates for this exam have hands-on experience with AWS command line interface, AWS Management Console, AWS APIs, SDKs, and IDE toolkits. They should also have a good understanding of AWS architecture and services, and experience with networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data management, capacity planning, and elasticity.