The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) examination is intended for individuals who have technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on AWS.
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%
ANSWER1:
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NOTES/HINT1: The Shared Responsibility Model is the security model under which AWS provides secure infrastructure and services, while the customer is responsible for secure operating systems, platforms, and data.
ANSWER2:
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NOTES/HINT2: The side-by-side testing method is used to compare a control system to a test system, with the goal of assessing whether changes applied to the test system improve a particular metric compared to the control system.
Reference2: AWS Side by side testing
ANSWER3:
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NOTES/HINT3: The IPSec and the BGP connections must both be terminated on the same user gateway device.
Reference3: IpSec and BGP in AWS
ANSWER4:
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NOTES/HINT4: Security is the pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
Reference4: AWS Well-Architected Framework: Security
ANSWER5:
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NOTES/HINT: Within the realm of Amazon S3 backups, snapshots are block-based.
Reference5: Snapshots are block based
ANSWER6:
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NOTES/HINT6: Amazon VPC provides the option of creating a hardware VPN connection between remote customer networks and their Amazon VPC over the Internet using IPsec encryption technology.
Reference6: Amazon VPC IPSec Encryption
ANSWER7:
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NOTES/HINT7: To make a clean backup of a database, that database should be put into hot backup mode before making a snapshot of it.
Reference: AWS Prescriptive Backup Recovery Guide
ANSWER8:
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NOTES/HINT8: Performance efficiency is the pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Reference8: Performance Efficiency Pillar – AWS Well-Architected Framework
ANSWER9:
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NOTES/HINT9: AWS Storage Gateway supports Gateway-stored volumes, Gateway-cached volumes, and Gateway-virtual tape library.
Reference9: AWS Storage Gateway configurations
ANSWER10:
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NOTES/HINT10: With AWS Direct Connect you can establish private connectivity between AWS and a data center, office, or co-location environment.
Reference: AWS Direct Connect
A) Purchase Reserved Instances.
B) Submit a request for a Spot block.
C) Submit a request for all Spot Instances.
D) Use a mixture of On-Demand and Spot Instances
ANSWER11:
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NOTES/HINT11: Legacy applications designed to run on a single server frequently store session data locally. When these applications are deployed on multiple instances behind a load balancer, user requests are routed to instances using the round robin routing algorithm. Session data stored on one instance would not be present on the others. By enabling sticky sessions, cookies are used to track user requests and keep subsequent requests going to the same instance.
Reference 11: Sticky Sessions
A) Purchase Reserved Instances.
B) Submit a request for a Spot block.
C) Submit a request for all Spot Instances.
D) Use a mixture of On-Demand and Spot Instances.
ANSWER12:
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NOTES/HINT12: The solution will take advantage of Spot pricing, but by using a Spot block instead of Spot Instances, the company can be assured the job will not be interrupted.
Reference12: Spot Block
A) Build a web scraper to monitor the Personal Health Dashboard. When new health events are detected, send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team.
B) Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events event based off the AWS Health service and send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team.
C) Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events event that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team to remind the team to view the maintenance events on the Personal Health Dashboard.
D) Create an AWS Lambda function that continuously pings all EC2 instances to confirm their health. Alert the team if this check fails.
ANSWER13:
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NOTES/HINT13: The AWS Health service publishes Amazon CloudWatch Events. CloudWatch Events can trigger Amazon SNS notifications. This method requires neither additional coding nor infrastructure. It automatically notifies the team of upcoming events, and does not depend upon brittle solutions like web scraping.
Reference 13: Amazon CloudWatch Events
A) Within each account, create a custom routing table containing routes that point to the other account’s virtual private gateway.
B) Within each account, set up a NAT gateway in a public subnet in its respective VPC. Then, using the public IP address from the NAT gateway, enable routing between the two VPCs.
C) From one account, configure a Site-to-Site VPN connection between the VPCs. Within each account, add routes in the VPC route tables that point to the CIDR block of the remote VPC.
D) From one account, create a VPC peering request. After an administrator from the other account accepts the request, add routes in the route tables for each VPC that point to the CIDR block of the peered VPC.
ANSWER14:
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NOTES/HINT14: A VPC peering connection enables routing using each VPC’s private IP addresses as if they were in the same network. Traffic using inter-Region VPC peering always stays on the global AWS backbone and never traverses the public internet.
Reference14: VPC Peering
Which solution will grant the application access to the table in the MOST secure manner?
A) Create an IAM group for the application and attach a permissions policy with the necessary privileges. Add the EC2 instances to the IAM group.
B) Create an IAM resource policy for the DynamoDB table that grants the necessary permissions to Amazon EC2.
C) Create an IAM role with the necessary privileges to access the DynamoDB table. Associate the role with the EC2 instances.
D) Create an IAM user for the application and attach a permissions policy with the necessary privileges. Generate an access key and embed the key in the application code.
ANSWER15:
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NOTES/HINT15: An IAM role can be used to provide permissions for applications that are running on Amazon EC2 instances
to make AWS API requests using temporary credentials.
Reference15: IAM Role
A) Configure an Amazon CloudWatch Events scheduled event that triggers an AWS Lambda function that backs up the S3 bucket prior to the nightly job. When bad objects are discovered, restore the backed up version.
B) Create an S3 event on object creation that copies the object to an Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) cluster. When bad objects are discovered, retrieve the previous version from Amazon ES.
C) Create an AWS Lambda function that copies the object to an S3 bucket owned by a different account. Trigger the function when new objects are created in Amazon S3. When bad objects are discovered, retrieve the previous version from the other account.
D) Enable versioning on the S3 bucket. When bad objects are discovered, access previous versions with the AWS CLI or AWS Management Console.
ANSWER16:
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NOTES/HINT16: Enabling versioning is a simple solution; (A) involves writing custom code, (C) has no versioning, so the replication will overwrite the old version with the bad version if the error is not discovered quickly, and (B) will involve expensive storage that is not well suited for objects.
Reference16: Versioning
ANSWER17:
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NOTES/HINT17: AWS provides security of the cloud, including maintenance of the hardware and hypervisor software supporting Amazon EC2. Customers are responsible for any maintenance or monitoring within an EC2 instance, and for configuring their VPC infrastructure.
Reference17: Security of the cloud
Which solution will meet these requirements?
A) Create a custom report using AWS Systems Manager inventory to identify unapproved AMIs.
B) Run Amazon Inspector on each EC2 instance and flag the instance if it is using unapproved AMIs.
C) Use an AWS Config rule to identify unapproved AMIs.
D) Use AWS Trusted Advisor to identify the EC2 workloads using unapproved AMIs.
ANSWER18:
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NOTES/HINT18: AWS Config has a managed rule that handles this scenario.
Reference18: Managed Rule
What should the administrator do to block this traffic?
A) Install Amazon Inspector on Amazon EC2 instances to block the traffic.
B) Use Amazon GuardDuty to protect the web servers from bots and scrapers.
C) Use AWS Lambda to analyze the web server logs, detect bot traffic, and block the IP addresses in the security groups.
D) Use an AWS WAF rate-based rule to block the traffic when it exceeds a threshold.
ANSWER19:
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NOTES/HINT19: AWS WAF has rules that can protect web applications from HTTP flood attacks.
Reference19: HTTP Flood
An Elastic Load Balancer connects to a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances that connect to an Amazon RDS database over port 1521. The security groups are named elbSG, ec2SG, and rdsSG, respectively.
How should these security groups be implemented?
A) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from 0.0.0.0/0;
ec2SG: allow port 443 from elbSG;
rdsSG: allow port 1521 from ec2SG.
B) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from 0.0.0.0/0;
ec2SG: allow port 80 and 443 from elbSG and rdsSG;
rdsSG: allow port 1521 from ec2SG.
C) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from ec2SG;
ec2SG: allow port 80 and 443 from elbSG and rdsSG;
rdsSG: allow port 1521 from ec2SG.
D) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from ec2SG;
ec2SG: allow port 443 from elbSG;
rdsSG: allow port 1521 from elbSG.
ANSWER20:
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NOTES/HINT20: elbSG must allow all web traffic (HTTP and HTTPS) from the internet. ec2SG must allow traffic from the load balancer only, in this case identified as traffic from elbSG. The database must allow traffic from the EC2 instances only, in this case identified as traffic from ec2SG.
Reference20: Allow all traffic
A) Create an AD policy to modify Windows Firewall settings on all hosts in the VPC to deny access from the IP address block
B) Modify the Network ACLs associated with all public subnets in the VPC to deny access from the IP address block
C) Add a rule to all of the VPC 5 Security Groups to deny access from the IP address block
D) Modify the Windows Firewall settings on all Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that your organization uses in that VPC to deny access from the IP address block
ANSWER21:
NOTES22: Add a rule to all of the VPC 5 Security Groups to deny access from the IP address bloc
Reference22: VPC
A) Gather evidence of your IT operational controls
B) Request and obtain applicable third-party audited AWS compliance reports and certifications
C) Request and obtain a compliance and security tour of an AWS data center for a pre-assessment security review
D) Request and obtain approval from AWS to perform relevant network scans and in-depth penetration tests of your system’s Instances and endpoint
E) Schedule meetings with AWS’s third-party auditors to provide evidence of AWS compliance that maps to your control objectives
ANSWER22:
NOTES22: AWS Security
Reference22: AWS Audit Manager
A) Set the ELB to only be attached to another AZ
B) Make sure Auto Scaling is configured to launch in both AZs
C) Make sure your AMI is available in both AZs
D) Make sure the maximum size of the Auto Scaling Group is greater than 4
ANSWER23:
NOTES23: AZs
Reference23: AZs
A) Ensure the application instances are properly configured with an Elastic Load Balancer
B) Ensure the application instances are launched in private subnets with the EBS-optimized option enabled
C) Ensure the application instances are launched in public subnets with the associate-publicIP-address=true option enabled
D) Launch application instances in private subnets with an Auto Scaling group and Auto Scaling triggers configured to watch the SOS queue size
ANSWER24:
NOTES24: SQS
Reference24: SQS
A) Add an additional ENI
B) Change to a larger Instance
C) Use DirectConnect between EC2 and S3
D) Use EBS PIOPS on the local volume
ANSWER25:
NOTES25: EC2 instances
Reference25: EC2 Best Practices
A) Elastic IPS (EIP)
B) NAT Gateway (NAT)
C) Internet Gateway {IGW)
D) Virtual Private Gateway (VGW)
ANSWER26:
NOTES26: IGW and VGW
Reference26: IGW – VGW
A) Ensure that you have pre-allocated 175 Elastic IP addresses so that each server will be able to obtain one as it launches
B) Check the service limits in Trusted Advisor and adjust as necessary so the forecasted count remains within limits
C) Change your Auto Scaling configuration to set a desired capacity of 175 prior to the launch of the marketing campaign
D) Pre-warm your Elastic Load Balancer to match the requests per second anticipated during peak demand prior to the marketing campaign
ANSWER:
A) Change the thresholds set on the Auto Scaling group health check
B) Add an Elastic Load Balancing health check to your Auto Scaling group
C) Increase the value for the Health check interval set on the Elastic Load Balancer
D) Change the health check set on the Elastic Load Balancer to use TCP rather than HTTP checks
ANSWER:
NOTES: Add an Elastic Load Balancing Health Check to your Auto Scaling GroupBy default, an Auto Scaling group periodically reviews the results of EC2 instance status to determine the health state of each instance. However, if you have associated your Auto Scaling group with an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer, you can choose to use the Elastic Load Balancing health check. In this case, Auto Scaling determines the health status of your instances by checking the results of both the EC2 instance status check and the Elastic Load Balancing instance health check.
Reference: AWS ELB
A) Amazon S3
B) Amazon RDS
C) Amazon EBS
D) Amazon Redshift
ANSWER:
A) Nothing, there are no single points of failure in this architecture.
B) Create and attach a second IGW to provide redundant internet connectivity.
C) Create and configure a second Elastic Load Balancer to provide a redundant load balancer.
D) Create a second multi-AZ RDS instance in another Availability Zone and configure replication to provide a redundant database.
ANSWER:
Reference: ELB
A) Each subnet maps to a single Availability Zone
B) A CIDR block mask of /25 is the smallest range supported
C) Instances in a private subnet can communicate with the internet only if they have an Elastic IP.
D) By default, all subnets can route between each other, whether they are private or public
E) V Each subnet spans at least 2 Availability zones to provide a high-availability environment
ANSWER:
A) Create an IAM role with the Put MetricData permission and modify the Auto Scaling launch configuration to launch instances in that role
B) Create an IAM user with the PutMetricData permission and modify the Auto Scaling launch configuration to inject the userscredentials into the instance User Data
C) Modify the appropriate Cloud Watch metric policies to allow the Put MetricData permission to instances from the Auto Scaling group
D) Create an IAM user with the PutMetricData permission and put the credentials in a private repository and have applications on the server pull the credentials as needed
ANSWER:
Reference: IAM
A) Data is automatically saved as an E8S volume.
B) Data is automatically saved as an ESS snapshot.
C) Data is automatically deleted.
D) Data is unavailable until the instance is restarted.
ANSWER:
A) Leverage CloudFront for the delivery of the articles.
B) Add RDS read-replicas for the read traffic going to your relational database
C) Leverage ElastiCache for caching the most frequently used data.
D) Use SOS to queue up the requests for the technical posts and deliver them out of the queue.
E) Use Route53 health checks to fail over to an S3 bucket for an error page.
ANSWER:
A) Create a second, independent LOAP server in AWS for your application to use for authentication
B) Establish a VPN connection so your applications can authenticate against your existing on-premises LDAP servers
C) Establish a VPN connection between your data center and AWS create a LDAP replica on AWS and configure your application to use the LDAP replica for authentication
D) Create a second LDAP domain on AWS establish a VPN connection to establish a trust relationship between your new and existing domains and use the new domain for authentication
ANSWER:
2- GoCertify
I WANT TO BECOME A SYSADMIN
This is a common topic that has been asked multiple times.
Professional/Non-technical
My labs:
Create S3 buckets, set access logs, set default encryption with KMS and create a bunch of lifecycle policies
Create a VPC with public/private subnets, create SGs, create & send flow logs to an S3 bucket.
Connect Lambda to a VPC, use RDS proxy to connect to an RDS Database. Select correct execution role for the Lambda.
Exam lab experience
I did not have any negative experiences with the lab environment (I heard a lot of horror stories), however I did take the exam at a testing center.
When you register for your SOA-C02, you gain access (via Pearson VUE E-mail) to a free sample exam lab at Login – OneLearn Training Management System – Skillable – this is the exact same testing environment you will have during the actual exam. I highly recommend you do this, especially if you’re doing the exam from home – any issues you have with the testing environment like laggy interface, copy/paste issues, etc you’ll probably also have during the exam.
Study resources
My study resources were:
Adrian Cantrill’s course
Jon Bonso’s (TutorialDojo) Practice Exams
uacantril’s courses are the best, most high quality courses I’ve ever taken for any subject.
Since I’ve done the SAA-C02 course before doing the SOA-C02 course, I was able to easily skip the shared lessons & demos (there heavy overlap between these two exams) and focus on the SOA-C02 specific topics.
uTutorials_Dojo’s practice exams are 10/10 as preparation material. They were a bit more tricky (in a ‘gotcha’ kind of way) compared to the exam questions, but they were very close to the real thing.
Study methodology
My study plan was as follows:
Study Time: 7:00-9:00 (morning) Mon-Fri, which included:
Going through Adrian’s course
Detailed notes in markdown
Doing potential exam labs in AWS console
Reading AWS official documentation (in case something is not clear)
Review Notes regularly (once course material finished)
Practice Exams
Doing exams in review mode
Delving deeper into topics I was lacking in
This was the plan, but I turned out to be somewhat inconsistent, taking the exam 3 months later than planned due to being a new father and not focusing on just one thing (also did some Python learning during the same period). But, still a pass!
Source: r/AWSCertification
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