AWS SysOps Administrator (SOA-C02) Certification Prep
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Everything you need to get ready for exam day
Course outcomes
- Understand the core domains of the AWS SysOps Administrator – Associate exam
- Gain insights into AWS deployment, management, and operational best practice.
- Explore monitoring and reporting features of AWS
- Understand data management, security practices, and networking on AWS
- Prepare for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam
Course description
Join expert Mark Wilkins to get an in-depth exploration of the key topics and knowledge areas required for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) exam. You’ll gain insights into AWS deployment, management, and operations, along with best practices to optimize AWS services. You’ll come away from this 4-hour course equipped with the knowledge and skills to become proficient SysOps administrators on the AWS platform.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Deploy, manage, and operate scalable systems on AWS
- Implement and control data flow to and from AWS
- Identify and deploy operational level metrics, monitoring, and logging systems on AWS
- Implement systems to ensure data integrity and availability
- Recognize and implement Well-Architected Framework best practices for security and networking in AWS
- Feel confident in your preparedness for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a systems administrator with experience managing or building applications on AWS.
- You’re an IT professional who’s interested in deepening your knowledge of AWS operations and deployment.
- You’re preparing for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam.
Prerequisites
- Basic understanding of AWS core cloud and infrastructure services
- Familiarity with the AWS Management Console
- Basic knowledge of networking, computing, storage, and database services on AWS
- Prior hands-on experience with AWS (recommended)
Recommended preparation:
- Read AWS Cloud Computing Concepts and Tech Analogies (book)
- Take AWS Technical Essentials (live online course with Mark Wilkins)
Recommended follow-up:
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Introduction (10 minutes)
- Presentation: Overview of AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam; role of SysOps administrator at AWS
Domain 1: Monitoring and reporting (45 minutes)
- Presentation: AWS monitoring and logging services (CloudTrail); CloudWatch and its components; EventBridge rules and actions; Systems Manager automation
- Demonstration: CloudWatch metrics, alarms, metric filters, and dashboards; notifications (SNS, service quotas, CloudWatch alarms, AWS Health events, Systems Manager, Config)
- Q&A
- Break
Domain 2: Reliability and business continuity (35 minutes)
- Presentation: Elastic Load Balancing and Route 53 health checks; EC2 Auto Scaling and its benefits; implementing RDS and Amazon Aurora replicas; restoring Amazon RDS databases (point-in-time restore, promote read replica, Amazon Aurora high availability features)
- Demonstration: Automating snapshots and backups (RDS snapshots, AWS Backup, RTO and RPO); Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager; ELB setup; EC2 Auto Scale; Single and Multi-AZ deployments (EC2 Auto Scaling groups, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon FSx, Amazon RDS)
- Group discussion: Deploying fault-tolerant workloads
- Q&A
Domain 3: Deployment, provisioning and automation (50 minutes)
- Demonstration: Creating and managing AMIs (EC2 Image Builder); provisioning CloudFormation and StackSets
- Presentation: Create, manage, and troubleshoot AWS CloudFormation; use AWS deployment services (Systems Manager, CloudFormation) to automate deployment processes; select deployment scenarios and services (blue/green, rolling, canary, etc.).
- Group discussion: Identify and remediate deployment issues
- Q&A
- Break
Domain 4: Security and compliance (35 minutes)
- Presentation: AWS Identity and Access Management features (password policies, MFA, roles resource policies); AWS Organizations and service control policies (Control Tower, Security Hub); Secrets Manager; Systems Manager Parameter Store; Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Config, Amazon Inspector Demonstration: Troubleshooting access issues (CloudTrail, IAM Access Analyzer, IAM policy simulator); AWS Organizations; SCP; Key Management Service
- Q&A
Domain 5: Networking and content delivery (50 minutes)
- Presentation: Amazon VPC and its components (subnets, network ACLs, gateways); VPC peering and VPN connections; Route 53 hosted zones and routing policies; troubleshooting network connectivity
- Demonstration: Network protection with WAF and Shield; Amazon CloudFront and OAI
- Q&A
- Break
Domain 6: Cost and performance optimization (40 minutes)
- Presentation: Using AWS deployment services (Systems Manager, CloudFormation) to automate deployment processes
- Group discussion: Cost optimization strategies on AWS for compute resources (Trusted Advisor, AWS Compute Optimizer, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets) Demonstration: Monitoring EBS and RDS metrics for performance efficiencies; S3 performance features (S3 transfer acceleration, multipart upload); enhanced EC2 capabilities (ENI, placement groups, instance store)
- Q&A
Wrap-up and Q&A (15 minutes)
Your Instructor
Mark Wilkins
Mark Wilkins has more than 20 years’ experience designing, deploying, and supporting software and hardware technology in the corporate and small business world. Currently, Mark provides training and consulting services to corporate customers throughout North America. Previously, as course director for Global Knowledge, Mark developed and taught technical seminars and developed courseware for the 2008 Microsoft official curriculum stream.
Since 2010, Mark has focused on cloud services, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM SoftLayer. Among Mark’s many certifications are Amazon Web Services Architect - Associate and AWS Sys-Ops - Associate. He is the author of Learning AWS, published in 2019 by Addison-Wesley.