Announcing the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) exam

It’s been a while since we’ve had any major certification exam news or updates from AWS, but that all changed recently.

In July 2025, AWS announced that the current version of the “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02)” exam would be changing and that a new version of this exam (SOA-C03) with a new name (“AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate”) would be available to sit beginning September 30, 2025.

AWS frequently updates its exams to ensure they continue to validate your knowledge of current AWS service offerings, which are constantly evolving as AWS implements hundreds of updates across its platform every month. Given that the current (SOA-C02) version of the exam has been around since 2021, this particular certification was certainly due for an update!

I’m going to break down what has changed between the current (SOA-C02) and updated (SOA-C03) exam blueprints with some helpful tips for anyone studying to take this new exam over the next several months.

Key changes at a glance

• The name of this Associate-level certification is changing from SysOps Administrator to CloudOps Engineer, reflecting a shift in how AWS sees this job role evolving beyond “sysadmin” into more automation-driven cloud operations.
• The new SOA-C03 exam places a greater emphasis on Reliability and Business Continuity as well as Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation.
• The new SOA-C03 exam adds several in scope services, including containers (ECR, ECS, EKS), newer database services (Aurora Serverless v2, RDS Proxy, DAX), and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

All this being said, the vast majority of the exam content remains unchanged from the current version.

Role identity updates

The new AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) exam has been rebranded to match a more expanded CloudOps engineer role. In the new exam guide, AWS states that the “target candidate should have 1 year of experience with deployment, management, troubleshooting, networking, and security on AWS,” and “have at least 1 year of experience in a related operations role such as system administrator.”

Domain structure changes

The current SOA-C02 exam assesses your knowledge across six content domains, broken down as follows:

The updated SOA-C03 exam guide references the following five domains:

As you can see, domains 2-5 are the same in both the old and new exam guides, with only slight differences in some of the percentages of scored content represented by each domain. Domain 6 from the old exam guide has largely been consolidated into domain 1 in the new exam guide, with some of the various cost optimisation tasks from the SOA-C02 exam now listed as general recommended AWS knowledge under the heading Cloud financial management.

Domain 1: Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimisation (22%)

This domain centers on implementing robust observability and automated operational responses within AWS. Key tasks involve configuring metrics, alarms, and dashboards using services like Amazon CloudWatch, analysing logs with AWS CloudTrail, and collecting detailed data from EC2 instances and ECS/EKS containers via the CloudWatch agent.

You should know how to create automated remediation workflows using Amazon EventBridge to detect operational events and trigger actions, such as executing AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks. You should also know how to optimise the performance and cost of resources like EBS volumes, S3 storage, EFS and FSx file systems, and RDS databases.

Domain 2: Reliability and Business Continuity (22%)

This domain tests your ability to build highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable systems that are resilient to failures. You should know how to implement elasticity by configuring scaling mechanisms for compute resources and managed databases like RDS and DynamoDB, as well as how to enhance performance using caching services like ElastiCache and CloudFront.

Another core focus of this domain is ensuring high availability through services like Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 health checks. You should be familiar with common backup and restore strategies, including how to automate backups with AWS Backup and perform various restore methods to meet specific recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).

Domain 3: Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation (22%)

This domain validates your proficiency in automating the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure. You should know how to create and manage AMIs and container images with tools like EC2 Image Builder, and how to deploy infrastructure as code using CloudFormation and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

You should also be able to manage deployments across multiple AWS regions and accounts using StackSets and the AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), as well as troubleshoot common deployment issues. This domain also emphasises automating operational tasks, using AWS Systems Manager for configuration management and orchestrating event-driven automation with services like Lambda and S3 Event Notifications. Understanding common deployment patterns such as blue/green and rolling upgrades is also in scope for this domain.

Domain 4: Security and Compliance (16%)

This domain covers the implementation and management of security controls to protect data and infrastructure according to compliance requirements. You should have a strong command of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and know how to configure roles, resource policies, and multi-factor authentication (MFA).

You should also be able to audit and troubleshoot access issues using tools like CloudTrail and the IAM Access Analyzer. Other key tasks include implementing data protection strategies, such as encrypting data both at rest with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and in transit with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), while securely managing credentials with AWS Secrets Manager. You should also be able to analyse and remediate findings from security monitoring services like AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Inspector.

Domain 5: Networking and Content Delivery (18%)

This final domain focuses on your ability to implement, secure, and troubleshoot AWS networking and content delivery services. Core competencies covered in this domain include configuring VPC components such as subnets, route tables, network ACLs, and security groups, as well as establishing private connectivity.

You should know how to audit and configure network protection services like AWS WAF, Shield, and Network Firewall. This domain will also test your skills in configuring DNS with Route 53 routing policies and accelerating content delivery with Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator. Finally, you should feel comfortable performing troubleshooting tasks like analysing VPC Flow Logs and ELB access logs to diagnose and resolve network connectivity issues.

The bigger picture

The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) exam emphasises the tools and practices that AWS expects CloudOps engineers to use today, including container platforms, infrastructure as code with the AWS CDK, observability stacks, and modern security controls. CloudOps covers a far broader range of topics than SysOps, spanning automation, observability, and multi-account governance. However, it should come as no surprise that security and compliance remain central to the role.

Frequently asked questions

Are there any changes to the structure or passing score for the updated AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) certification exam?

Like the current SOA-C02 exam, the updated SOA-C03 exam has a duration of 130 minutes and consists of 65 multiple choice and multiple response questions. Most questions will have 4 possible answer options where you must select one correct answer. Others may have 5 or 6 answer options from which you must select two or three correct answers. Of these 65 questions, only 50 questions will count towards your overall score.

The other 15 questions are used by AWS for evaluation purposes and do not affect your score in any way. There is no way to tell which questions are scored or unscored but there is also no penalty for guessing, so always be sure to answer every question...even if it’s just an educated guess! Just like its predecessor, the SOA-C03 exam will be scored on a scale from 100 to 1000, with a minimum passing score of 720.

Will the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) exam include any labs?

You may recall that at one point, the SOA-C02 exam included a labs component. This was removed back in March 2023. At the time, this removal was promised to be temporary; however, labs never reappeared in the SOA-C02 exam. The newly updated SOA-C03 exam does not have any labs, either.

I recently passed the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) exam. Do I need to recertify?

This is always a concern when AWS announces an updated certification, and for good reason! It’s likely you just spent months studying for an exam, only to find out that AWS is updating it in the not-too-distant future. Well, I have some good news for you: you do NOT have to re-sit the updated certification exam to keep your credential!

Even if you pass the current SOA-C02 exam on the last day it is available (September 29, 2025), your AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate certification will still remain active and valid for 3 years from that date. There is no need for you to re-sit the newly updated exam unless you’re specifically interested in obtaining the new credential title of AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate.

Also keep in mind that you can continue to re-certify the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam by passing the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) exam at any time while your current AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate certification is valid.

Advice to anyone currently studying for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate certification

If you are currently registered or already planning to take the current SOA-C02 exam before its last day on September 29, 2025, you should still absolutely do so. Your certification will remain valid for three years from the date you pass the exam no matter which version of the exam you take, and I’ve yet to encounter an employer who has insisted that a candidate take a specific version of an AWS certification exam.

However, if your timeline for obtaining this certification extends beyond September 29, 2025 for any reason, you should feel confident knowing that your efforts right now are still preparing you to take the updated SOA-C03 exam. Just be sure to take some extra time to focus on studying containers, multi-account and multi-region architectures, and automation as well!

In closing

To find out the latest information about this exam, and to learn more about updates to other AWS certification exams, you can always visit the Coming soon to AWS Certification page.

And for up-to-date training preparation covering all 12 AWS certifications, I encourage you to take a look at our AWS certification prep training along with our entire library of AWS certification content.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help. Best of luck on your certification journey!