Free AWS SOA-C02 practice exams are available here, covering all six official exam domains for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate certification. Whether you are just starting your prep or doing a final check before exam day, these questions are designed to match the style and difficulty of the real SOA-C02 exam.
What SOA-C02 covers
The SOA-C02 exam tests your ability to deploy, manage, and operate workloads on AWS. It is structured around six domains:
- Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation (20%) — CloudWatch alarms, metric filters, CloudTrail, AWS Config rules, and automated remediation with Systems Manager
- Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation (18%) — CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk deployment policies, Systems Manager Patch Manager, and blue/green strategies
- Networking and Content Delivery (18%) — VPC design, NAT Gateways, Route 53 routing policies, CloudFront, and VPC endpoints
- Reliability and Business Continuity (16%) — Auto Scaling, Multi-AZ RDS, S3 versioning, backup and restore strategies, and disaster recovery
- Security and Compliance (16%) — IAM roles, KMS encryption, GuardDuty, Security Hub, SCPs, and S3 Object Lock
- Cost and Performance Optimization (12%) — Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Cost Explorer, right-sizing, and Spot Instances
The exam has 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored), a 130-minute time limit, and a passing score of 720 out of 1000. Questions are multiple choice and multiple response, scenario-based, and often present two or three plausible options that require you to choose the most appropriate one.
What's in these practice exams
Six full sets of 20 questions each, covering topics including:
- CloudWatch Alarms, Composite Alarms, and Logs Insights
- Systems Manager Run Command, Patch Manager, and State Manager
- CloudFormation stack operations, StackSets, and WaitConditions
- VPC routing, NACLs vs security groups, and Transit Gateway
- IAM cross-account roles, SCPs, and MFA enforcement
- RDS Multi-AZ, Aurora Read Replicas, and DynamoDB capacity modes
- S3 Lifecycle rules, Object Lock, and encryption at rest
- Cost Anomaly Detection, Savings Plans, and right-sizing recommendations
The first set is completely free — no account required. Additional sets are available individually or as part of the AWS bundle.
How to use these questions effectively
Start with the free set under timed conditions to establish a baseline score. Focus your review on the domains where you drop the most points rather than studying evenly across all six.
For the scenario-based questions, get into the habit of reading all four options before choosing. SOA-C02 questions frequently include distractors that are technically correct AWS features but wrong for the scenario described. The explanations after each question break down why each incorrect option fails, which is often more valuable than confirming why the right answer is right.
After working through the sets, revisit any questions you answered correctly by guessing — understanding the reasoning is what matters for the exam, not the final score in practice.