AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate
Validates ability to deploy, manage, operate, and troubleshoot workloads on AWS. Covers monitoring and logging, reliability and business continuity, deployment automation, security and compliance, and networking and content delivery. Replaces the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate (SOA-C02) with expanded coverage of containers, multi-account and multi-Region architectures, and infrastructure as code.
Exam domains
- Reliability and Business Continuity22%
Implement scalability and elasticity (EC2 Auto Scaling Groups - launch templates/configurations, mixed instance policies, target tracking/step/predictive scaling, scheduled scaling; Application Auto Scaling for ECS/DynamoDB/Aurora/Comprehend/SageMaker; AWS Auto Scaling unified service; Aurora Auto Scaling Read Replicas; DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned with auto scaling). Implement high availability and resilient environments (multi-AZ patterns - RDS Multi-AZ, ElastiCache Multi-AZ, EFS regional, ALB cross-zone load balancing; Elastic Load Balancing target group health checks; Route 53 health checks and DNS failover with multi-region; AWS Fault Injection Simulator for chaos engineering; AWS Resilience Hub for assessment). Implement backup and restore strategies (AWS Backup centralized backup across services - EC2/EBS/RDS/EFS/DynamoDB/Storage Gateway; backup vaults with encryption and access policies; backup plans with schedules and lifecycle to cold storage; restore testing; AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery - AWS DRS for cross-region replication; pilot light, warm standby, multi-site DR patterns; RTO/RPO trade-offs; S3 Cross-Region Replication and S3 Versioning).
- Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation22%
Provision and maintain cloud resources (AWS CloudFormation - templates, stacks, change sets, drift detection, nested stacks, StackSets for multi-account/multi-region, custom resources via Lambda, CloudFormation Hooks for pre-deployment validation, transforms - SAM and CloudFormation Macros; AWS CDK constructs in TypeScript/Python/Java/.NET/Go; AWS Service Catalog products and portfolios for governance; AWS Proton for templated environment provisioning). Automate manual or repeatable processes (AWS Systems Manager - Run Command, Patch Manager, Maintenance Windows, State Manager, Session Manager replacing bastion hosts, Parameter Store for config, Automation runbooks; AWS Lambda for event-driven automation; Amazon EventBridge schedules and rules; AWS Step Functions Standard vs Express workflows; CodePipeline for CI/CD; container deployment with ECS task definitions, Fargate, EKS pod specs and Helm charts). IaC best practices (modular templates, parameter and condition functions, deletion policies and retain semantics, drift detection in scheduled jobs, encryption of templates in S3, secret injection via Secrets Manager and Parameter Store dynamic references).
Sources
Questions are grounded in 50 references from official and authoritative materials.