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AWS Exam Syllabus

SOA-C03 syllabus, skills measured, and exam topics

The AWS SOA-C03 exam covers the official skills measured for AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate. Use this page to review the current syllabus, major domains, and official resources before you book the exam.

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What to know before you study

These sections explain the role, audience, and exam framing behind the outline.

Introduction

  • The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) exam is intended for CloudOps engineers. The exam validates a candidate's ability to deploy, manage, and operate workloads on AWS.
  • The exam also validates a candidate's ability to complete the following tasks:

Target candidate description

  • The target candidate should have 1 year of experience with deployment, management, troubleshooting, networking, and security on AWS. The target candidate also should have at least 1 year of experience in a related operations role such as system administrator.

Recommended general IT knowledge and experience

  • The target candidate should have the following general IT knowledge and experience:

Detailed outline

Scan each section as a working study checklist instead of one long wall of text.

Recommended AWS knowledge and experience

  • The target candidate should have the following AWS knowledge:

Job tasks that are out of scope for the target candidate

  • The following list contains job tasks that the target candidate is not expected to be able to perform. This list is non-exhaustive. These tasks are out of scope for the exam:

Response types

  • The exam includes two types of questions:
  • Multiple choice and multiple response: Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or skill might choose. Distractors are generally plausible responses that match the content area.
  • On the exam, unanswered questions are scored as incorrect. There is no penalty for guessing. The exam includes 50 questions that affect your score. These questions include multiple-choice questions and multiple-response questions. Each scored multiple-choice question and each scored multiple-response question counts as a single scored opportunity.

Unscored content

  • The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.

Exam results

  • The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) exam has a pass or fail designation. The exam is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and guidelines.
  • Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720. Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.
  • Your score report could contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.
  • Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other sections have. The table of classifications contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use caution when you interpret section-level feedback.