S0A-C01
Ace the Certified SysOps Admin Associate Exam - SOA-C01 with our guide
Pass the AWS Certified SysOps Admin Associate Certification - SOA-C01 on a budget
For this test I recommend studying for at least 4 weeks. Using the first 15 days take the free official AWS course 1 hour daily, during the remaining 15 days take 1 of our 20-question SysOps Admin Associate Study Mode Assessment complete it then save it and check your progress on the "My Track" section, do this daily. After you complete all the simulator questions do an "All My Incorrect Questions" test. Once Your track is complete (My Track - Overall score > 80%) take the final exam readiness test by doing an Exam mode Assessment (you can get a pdf certificate!), once you pass this exam you will be ready to take the official aws certification exam.
Preparation duration:
- 4 weeks 1 hour each day.
Free Official AWS Course:
DEVSPOT resources:
Usually I recommend following this plan to get your certification:
- Week 1-2: Take the AWS training course
- Week 3: Start doing study mode exam simulations.
- Week 4: Complete My Track and do a full Exam Mode assessment
Some additional tips:
Topics:
- Cloud formation: make sure you know about nested stacks and stack sets.
- AWS config: what it is, use cases.
- AWS Personal health dashboard vs AWS service health dashboard.
- AWS organizations.
- Cloud HSM vs KMS: differences
- AWS systems manager.
- AWS service catalog
- AWS CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Inspector.
- Elastic load balancers and auto-scaling groups
- VPC endpoint use cases
- VPC subnetting rules
- Services that need a maintenance window.
- EC2: what is the difference between reboot and turn on-off, how to enable termination protection.
- AWS Cost explorer + tag management
My thoughts right after taking this exam:
I took the "a cloud guru" preparation, the explanations are on point but it felt a bit repetitive since I also took the SAA-C02 on their platform and ~60% of the content is shared between these 2 courses, also lacked the depth that the practice tests required, then went ahead and started to gather some practice questions from the web unaware that most of them were related to the old exam(SOA-C00) I started to answer them and noted a huge number of trick questions, some requested very irrelevant numbers that you needed to memorize I'm glad they scrapped this format, also found some more up to date questions(SOA-C01) which were way easier to read and answer.
Difficulty:
- Harder than Solutions Architect A.(926/1000) easier than Developer A.(862/1000)
In terms of difficulty, I would rank it second behind the SysOps Admin Associate exam but harder than the SAA-C02, in my opinion, this is no longer the hardest AWS exam as it used to be, In the legacy practice tests I couldn't go above 60% while in the new version I could easily score above 80%, I do not recommend doing this but it gave me more insight about the evolution of AWS and the huge steps they've taken towards simplicity and usability.
The Exam:
- Remote with Pearson Vue no issues 40+ mins unused
As I suspected all the SOA-C00 questions style were gone, felt like I was retaking Solutions Architect Associate but each question had 1 or 2 somewhat correct but not optimal solutions that might confuse you, Pearson Vue check-in was smooth, the exam started right on time.
Good luck!