How to clear the AWS SysOps Administrator Associate Exam

8 min readApr 4, 2023

If you read my other posts, you already know that I just recently started to go down the AWS certification road. If not, take a look at them here:

Having cleared them all, the AWS SysOps Administrator exam is the last one in the Associate tier. And frankly, I looked forward to this one. I have been an SysOps guy for as long as I can remember. And I still think this one is funny — and also has truth in it, like fixing a failed harddisk, while my cat tore down the christmas tree at 5 o’clock in the morning on the 25th of December):

Adminspotting Poster .. Choose your future. Choose to Sysadmin.

However, we now live in the age of Cloud Computing. Things like Blue/Green deployments, immutable hardware, CloudFormation, Puppet, Chef, and all this are available at the push of button. This SysOps becomes more about programming than about the need to switching blade-servers — for most of us anyways.

So, here is my learning summary and what I did to clear this exam.

Exam Blueprint

The AWS SysOps Admi Associate exam I took (AWS SOA-C01) is Multiple Choice/Multiple Answer. However, this will change as the new exam (AWS SOA-C02)— currently in Beta — will introduce Hands-On experience in the form of Labs. So please check the AWS SysOps Certification Webpage and have a look at the official exam guide and sample questions to get an idea on what to expect.

For the SOA-C01 exam, the one I sat down for, the facts have been — and will most likely stay, besides introducing labs:

65 Multiple Choice/Multiple Response questions
Exam Duration: 130 minutes
Passing Score: 720 of 1000 points
Valid for 3 years
Cost: $150 (or 75$ if you already passed another AWS exam and still have the 50% voucher)
You can take an ungraded practice exam for $20
Testing is done via PSI or Pearson VUE (either in a test center or online)

Preparation

Because I read that a lot of people on LinkedIn recommend the exam preparation courses from Stéphane Maarek, I gave his AWS SysOps course on Udemy a try. Moreover, I compared parts of it to the corresponding ACloudGuru course. Doing Stéphanes course — again with heavy note taking.

All in all, it took me about 45 hours to get through it all, while building a solid understanding of the exam topcis. I was able to go through the material faster, because there is a lot of stuff I already prepared for the Solutions Architect and Developer certificates. This was one of my hopes on from the early beginnings and it holds true. I already know my fair share of S3, EC2, Deployment types, VPC configuration. Therefore, I could fast-foward through parts of the course. However, I resisted the temptation to skip the lectures entirely. The reason was that, one of the nice features of Stéphanes couse is, that he really goes into detail on the topics. And I actually needed some of those in the actual exam. So staying with him was worth its while.

Besides switching from ACloudGuru to Stéphane Maarek, I stuck with the same routine I used in my preparation for the AWS Certified Developer course. This includes the section tests provided by Whizlabs, at least for the few sections they offered. And I polished of my exam preparation using the practice exams from TutorialsDojo.

Going through all of this took me around 80 hours in preparation time for the exam. 45 hours for the course. And 35 hourse for reading the recommended Whitepapers, FAQ, and working my way through all the practice exams. And because I wanted to be able to state that I cleared all three AWS associate exams in a month I scheduled the exam for the 31th of January. Which happend to be a Sunday. Thus, thanks to PSIs online proctoring and flexible schedules.

Resources

To our benefit AWS and third-party vendors provide a ton of resources. Here are the ones I used and mentioned above.

AWS SysOps Administrator Exam Webpage

As always, this is your first stop. Especially in case of the SysOps exam, as it is bound to change in the future.

Stéphane Maareks SysOps Admin Course

In terms of exam preparation, this is an excellent course. It basically covers all the important details you need to know. Moreover, there is a hands-on part in almost every lecture.

There is some duplicate knowledge in case you already did the Solutions Architect and Developer certifications. However, Stéphane recommends you do those first. And he has a point.

As there is always something changing in AWS, the course — as all the others — at times has some outdated information. E.g. that you need to use CloudHSM in case you need support for asymmetric encryption. So keep an eye on the Q&A section for each lecture. Somebody will have spotted and pointed out these inaccurracies.

There is only one odd thing a still can not wrap my head around. Stéphane has not been aware of how to pronounce SCSI. But this is just a fun fact. And who knows what I cannot pronounce or correctly write in English.

Overall, if you are only allowed one resource to prepare for the exam, use this course.

ACloudGuru Course

I passed three of my exams with the help of ACloudGuru. However in comparision to Stéphanes course, it just lacks the level of detail necessary for the exams. Well, at least most of the times. You can find gems here, that are not present in Stéphanes course — and vice versa. E.g. in my opinion the coverage of EBS is more detailed with ACloudGuru.

Moreover, there is one nice feature ACloudGuru offers: the exam summaries at the end of each section. Just watch them on the day of the exam at double-speed to get a last minute overview.

Whitepapers

For the SysOps Administrator, AWS recommends you have a look at these Whitepapers. And as with the preparation course, I have already been familiar with two of them, as they come up in the Developer Associate or Solutions Architect exams, too:

Besides those, I recommend you have a look at these two:

AWS FAQs

Having done all the Associate level exams, I am a firm believer that reading the FAQs will greatly improve your ability to rock the exam. For the SysOps Administrator, AWS recommends:

Whizlabs Section Tests and Practice Exam

I used the few section tests in parallel with Stéphanes course. And I worked through the Whizlabs Practice Exams after the course. This once more helped me greatly to improve and learn some more important details.

However, in comparison to the Whizlabs Practice exams I used before, this one gave me the impression of either being unfinished or abandoned. First of all, there are just three section tests:

AWS Config
Storage and Data Management
Monitoring and Reporting

And this only covers a really minor part of all the topics you need to be familiar with the exam. But on the other hand, some additional questions to test your knowledge are better than none.

Second, there is quite a bunch of questions that are so badly written that you have to guess the answers. Remarks in the forum on how to improve them are regularily ignored.

However, I could use the knowledge solidified by going through the practice exams in the actual exam. So it has neither been a waste of money nor of time. Just a little bit frustrating. I do not know, why this course is sub-standard in comparision to the others I used with Whizlabs. Hopefully they will fix it and/or give it a major overhaul once the new SOA-C02 exam is released.

In terms of difficulty, the practice exam questions have the same level as the acutal exam. You should be able to score about 90% in the practice exams. If you can do this, move on to Tutorials Dojo.

Tutorials Dojo Practice Exams

As with the Developer exam, this was my last stop before scheduling the actual exam. And I still learned some valuable lessons.

The difficulty level is about the same as with the actual exam. Thus, as with Whizlabs, you should be able to score about 90% in the practice exams and understand all the questions and answers. If so, you are ready to schedule the actual exam with AWS.

AWS Podcast

I really come to like the Podcast. First, it actually offers nice details on the sercvices, e.g. about CloudTrail Log validation. And I already could utilize some of the knowledge in the exams. Secondly, as I am going through them in chronological order, this is like a blast from the past.

Before Testing

As mentioned here you can get 30 minutes extra time, if English is not your native language. This can easily be done through the AWS Certification Website. You can find more details here.

And you need to have this approved by AWS before you can book the exam or the extra time will not be added.

And for me, this finally worked. I had issues with the ESL+30 since my first exam. Thus, although my ESL+30 had been approved by AWS and PSI could validate this in my account I was never granted these extra 30 minutes before — CCP, SAA, DVA exams. This has not been a problem, as never actually needed it. But I might just need it for the Professional exams.

Thus, I raised a ticket with both AWS and PSI on the 6th of January (after sitting for the SAA certificate) to get this fixed. And after countless calls with the PSI helpdesk and several emails back and forth, they finally had been able to fix this on the 23rd of January.

So in case you also have persisting issues with this, reach out to AWS early. This might take a while — who knows why.

Exam

Like the other exams, I used PSI with online proctoring variante. And again, it worked really well.

You can start the exam process 30 minutes before the scheduled time and should do so. It can take some time until a proctor is ready for you.

It took me about 60 minutes to finish the exam, including checking on the flagged questions one more time. You get a PASSED/FAILED feedback right after finishing the exam. Do not stand up before seeing this, your exam is still running until then.

Detailed feedback with the score you achieved will be available to you in at most five days. For me, this again just took 24 hours to show up on the AWS Certification website.

Outcome

I passed with a score of 926, confirming that my preparation routine works — at least for me.

The difficulty level was again higher than with the AWS sample questions but on par with the ones from Whizlabs and Tutorials Dojo.

Besides knowing all the material presented in the courses, it really helps to have a solid grasp on:

Networking and Routing. I got my CCNA years back, but the knowledge I gathered then still pays of. So know your way around routing tables, CIDR, subnets etc. pp. This will really help you in spotting the incorrect answers in some of the questions. Moreover, it makes all the VPC related questions so much easier.
Know HTTP error codes. Knowing the difference between the 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx groups is mandatory. Being able to easily troubleshoot the most likely cause for a 503 error in S3 is mandatory. And choice is if you can name the most common error codes and how to produce them.

That’s it, I hope you enjoyed my summary. And in case you also decide to go down the AWS certification road: Good Luck with your exams!