SysOps Administrator – Associate Certification Preparation for AWS (SOA-C01)
Description
Training Overview
Specifically designed to help you prepare for the AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate Certification, this Learning Path provides over 40 hours of interactive content comprised of hands-on labs, video courses, and a preparation exam. This training content has been carefully created to help you study for this practical AWS certification. The certification demands that the candidate demonstrates the ability to deploy AWS solutions for different scenarios per AWS's best practices, troubleshoot, and AWS environments for performance. The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Certification requires its candidates to be comfortable deploying and managing full production operations on AWS.
Intended Audience
This learning path is suitable for those wanting to pass the AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate Certification Exam.
Prerequisites
A basic understanding of cloud computing is not required but will help. We provide an introduction to AWS services, however, if you are new to cloud computing you might want to consider completing our What is Cloud Computing? course first.
Learning Objectives
The aim of the certification is to validate your knowledge across a number of different key areas, which have been defined by AWS as being able to:
- Deploy, manage, and operate scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant system
- Implement and control the flow of data to and from AWS
- Select the appropriate AWS service based on compute, data, or security requirements
- Identify appropriate use of AWS operational best practices
- Estimate AWS usage costs and identify operational cost control mechanisms
- Migrate on-premises workloads to AWS
As a means of demonstrating this knowledge, you will be tested across 7 different domains, with each domain contributing to a total percentage of your overall score. These domains are broken down as:
- Domain 1: Monitoring and Reporting 22%
- Domain 2: High Availability 8%
- Domain 3: Deployment and Provisioning 14%
- Domain 4: Storage and Data Management 12%
- Domain 5: Security and Compliance 18%
- Domain 6: Networking 14%
- Domain 7: Automation and Optimization 12%
As you progress through the Learning Path, you will gain all the information and knowledge required to fulfill the domain expectations, gaining a deep understanding within each area.
Feedback
We welcome all feedback and suggestions - please contact us at support@cloudacademy.com if you are unsure about where to start or if you would like help getting started.
Q&A
- What is AWS certified SysOps administrator?
Intended for individuals with one or two years experience as a systems administrator in a systems operations role, the exam validates the ability to deploy, manage and scale fault-tolerant applications on AWS.
- How will a SysOps Administrator certification benefit your career?
People that take this certification are usually looking to gain credentials in managing and deploying production operations on AWS. After completing the certification, candidates will be in a stronger position when applying for AWS positions and, in a team environment, will help to lead enterprises to further success.
- What is SysOps and DevOps?
SysOps and DevOps are large areas of cloud computing. DevOps manages all factors related to operation and development where SysOps looks after elements related to operations and systems.
Certificate

Learning Path Steps
This introductory video will outline what you will cover and learn in the SysOps learning path.
An explanation of the core components that make up the AWS Global Infrastructure
This course introduces you to arguably the most widely used storage service within AWS, the Amazon Simple Storage Service, more commonly known as Amazon S3.
Using Amazon S3 Bucket Properties & Management Features to Maintain Data
This course will look at some of the management and bucket property features that Amazon S3 has to offer, and how you can use them to maintain and control your data.
This course covers AWS Elastic File Service (EFS) and explains the service, its components, when it should be used, and how to configure it. It also covers data security and data migration from on-premises storage to EFS.
This short course will introduce you to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) service.
You can increase the storage space of an existing EBS volume without losing the data on the volume. To do this, you migrate your data to a larger volume and then extend the file system on the volume to recognize the newly-available space. After you verify t...
This course explains how and when to use Amazon S3, AWS Storage Gateway, and AWS Snowball for backup and disaster recovery.
This course dives into the fundamental elements of AWS compute services, discussing the features and advantages of each one.
By completing this hands-on lab, you will be able to create your first Amazon EC2 instance using the AWS Management Console.
In this lab you will learn how to create EC2 spot instances, how they can be used in AWS and how to handle instance interruptions.
This course explains how to implement both ELB and EC2 Auto Scaling and how they work together.
You will learn the steps to automatically scale up or down your EC2 infrastructure using Auto Scaling Groups.
Application Load Balancers support content-based routing, and supports applications that run in containers. They support a pair of industry-standard protocols (WebSocket and HTTP/2) and also provide additional visibility into the health of the target instan...
This course gives you an overview of the AWS Virtual Private Cloud and its associated networking components.
Learn how to increment the network security creating a public and private subnet on VPC and filter traffic using network ACL
Set up VPC peering between Amazon Virtual Private Clouds, leverage Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones, and diagnose network issues with VPC flow logs in this Lab
This course introduces you to two services that are used to manage DNS and content delivery within AWS: Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront.
In this course, you'll learn to design greater applications using managed services in a decoupled environment and understand the differences between SQS, SES, and SNS.
This course takes a high-level look at Amazon CloudWatch and some of its features and components.
CloudWatch is a monitoring service that AWS provides. You can use it to monitor AWS resources or custom resources, inside or outside AWS.
This course is geared towards helping you understand the value of building your own dashboards within CloudWatch, to give you unparalleled visibility into your architecture and dedicated systems.
Monitor Amazon CloudWatch Security Logs for failed SSH attempts
Learn how to use CloudWatch to monitor EC2 instance logs for failed SSH attempts
In this course, you'll learn how to implement logging and monitoring across AWS Services including Amazon CloudWatch, CloudWatch Monitoring Agent, AWS CloudTrail Logs, and Amazon S3 Access Logs.
In this course, you'll learn how to implement logging and monitoring across AWS Services including Amazon CloudWatch, CloudWatch Monitoring Agent, AWS CloudTrail Logs, and Amazon S3 Access Logs.
This course provides an introduction to the AWS CloudTrail service, looking at all its features and components.
This course (part of a two-part series on AWS database fundamentals) introduces you to Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Neptune.
This course (part of a two-part series on AWS database fundamentals) introduces you to Amazon Redshift, Amazon QLDB, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon Keyspaces.
In this course, you'll learn about RDS multi-AZ and will come away knowing when to implement and use this feature within your own environment.
This course on AWS Lambda shows you how to implement solutions and applications using a serverless architecture.
Learn how to create and run your first AWS Lambda function.
Learn how to invoke a Lambda function and implement custom logics in response to S3 events (e.g. object creation, update or deletion).
This course covers AWS Elastic Beanstalk, its uses, how it's configured and the various monitoring options available.
For controlled deployments and efficient deployment services of code on EC2 instances, Elastic Beanstalks provides a superior interaction model and developer tools experience.
In this course, you'll learn about AWS CloudFormation and it provides you with the ability to provision your infrastructure as code.
This blog post covers some of the best practices when using CloudFormation to deploy AWS services
In this course, you'll learn advanced AWS CloudFormation skills, including nested stacks, custom resources, continuous integration, and event automation.
Scalable DevOps: Using CloudFormation for Whole VPC Stacks.
Understand where your security responsibility starts and ends with the shared responsibility models
In this course, you will learn the basics of KMS, what it will cost to implement, how to encrypt data, and more...
In this course, you'll learn about the S3 encryption and decryption process for S3 Managed Keys, KMS Managed Keys, and Customer Provided Keys.
This course explains AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM), what it is, and how to implement it.
Learn how to create and manage IAM users, groups and policies to securely control access to AWS services and resources.
In this course, you'll learn about security mechanisms around AWS Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting, using a variety of services.
This course introduces you to AWS Identity Federation and includes a demo on how to use it.
This course explores the AWS Organizations service and how to use Service Control Policies (SCPs).
This course explores AWS WAF, AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Shield, and how they can be used to protect your cloud environments from malicious activity.
This course explains how to protect your AWS accounts by using the intelligent threat detection service, Amazon GuardDuty.
In this course, you'll learn about Amazon Inspector and its components, as well as watch a demonstration on how to configure it.
This course looks at how to use AWS Trusted Advisor to implement some best practices and recommendations across your AWS environment with your organization.
In this course, you'll learn how AWS Config allows you to have visibility of your entire AWS infrastructure from a configuration perspective.
Compliance check using AWS Config Rules: See how AWS Config can enhance your security and compliance with AWS managed rules and custom rules with AWS Lambda
Discover how to ace the planning and procurement of reserved cloud capacity, so you can successfully optimize your AWS spend.
This course explores the pricing of AWS storage services including Amazon S3, Glacier storage classes, Elastic File System, FSx, Storage Gateway, and AWS Backup.
In this course, you'll learn what you can do to reduce overall spending while maintaining innovation velocity.
Cert Prep: Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate for AWS (2018)
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 90+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 100,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.