Passing the AWS SOA(C03)//
SOA(C03) CloudOps Engineer:
The AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate is said to be the hardest of the associate level exams AWS has to offer. It tests your ability to implement solutions that are secure, scalable and redundant using a range of different services within the AWS cloud. You will learn a lot of theory on Databases, Containers, Compute, Storage, Load-Balancers and Scaling among some other odd services here and there in the analytical department.
Why?
At the start of 2025, i made it a goal of mine to learn and understand the Cloud. I had no background, i didnt even know how the Cloud infrastructure was physically deployed just that you couldnt touch it and gives me peace of mind for my iPhone backups. Since then i have come a long way passing the CCP, Solutions Architect Associate and now finishing the year with CloudOps Engineer Associate (formally known as SysOps Administrator). I didnt need this certification and it by no means has earned me anything in my career so far (fingers crossed it will at some point) this was simply an adhoc challenge i wanted to add to my accomplishments this year. I was happy with the Solutions Architect however upon reading this was supposedly the hardest associate level cert and complimented the SAA, i thought it be a no brainer to squeeze one more in before closing out the year.
Study Materials and Planning:
I gave myself 8 weeks to complete this certification however, i ended up completing it in 9 weeks. The final week was mainly because I wasnt confident that i'd studied the correct topics after i took the mock exam. I didnt want to potentially waste the 50% off coupon from Amazon (obtained through passing other exams) for the sake of a quick brush up. I would say on average i spent an hour a day studying and of course creating various AWS Cheat Sheets you can see on the navigation bar above.
I paid 16GBP for the DigitalCloud (Neal Davis) SOAC03 training course on Udemy. I wont go in to much detail here but it didnt compete with the likes of Adrian Cantrils course for SAA C03. I believe that a lot of the knowledge used for the SOA was obtained from the content covered extensively in Cantrils SAA course.
However, the SOA course was updated to include those additional subjects that Amazon added to the SysOps Admin course to make it CloudOps such as Containers/Kubernetes but the content seemed... brief. It felt like Davis' was reading from a slide word-for-word, verbatim. As if, Davis was following those sentences as they pop up on the presentation slide expecting the previous line to have been the last. It sometimes made the slides feel endless and didnt give me much confidence on the material overall.
After completion of Davis' course, I used TutorialsDojo practice exam, to which i didnt pass with a ~68% score (still pretty good for a first crack at it). I was surprised to find that around ~80% of the exam can be summarised with the same few topics... load-balancing, Autoscaling and CloudWatch. That final week meant i could pour around ~7 hours in to learning those final 3 topics.
Overall, im not sure i'd say it was more difficult than the SAA exam, although, i am not sure if this is because i over studied for that exam and learned a lot of the content that the SOA focuses on so i wasnt going in as blind. Either way, im very happy to close out the year with another certification obtained.
