Amazon SOA-C02 Practice Exams
Last updated on Oct 23,2026- Exam Code: SOA-C02
- Exam Name: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate
- Certification Provider: Amazon
- Latest update: Oct 23,2026
A company receives an alert from an Amazon CloudWatch alarm The alarm indicates that a web application that Is running on Amazon EC2 instances is not responding to requests The EC2 instances have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and are in an Auto Scaling group. The Auto Scaling group has a minimum capacity of 2 and a maximum capacity of 5.
An Investigation reveals that the web application is experiencing oul-of-memory errors. The company adds memory lo the web application and wants to track operating system memory utilization. A CloudWatch memory metric does not currently exist tor the EC2 Instances in the Auto Scaling group
What should a SysOps administrator do to provide a CloudWatch memory metric for the EC2 instances?
- A . Use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that includes the CloudWatch agent.
- B . Turn on CloudWatch detailed monitoring
- C . Turn on Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMOSv2).
- D . Use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is based on Amazon Linux.
A
Explanation:
Using an AMI with CloudWatch Agent:
The CloudWatch agent can collect memory utilization metrics and send them to CloudWatch.
Steps:
Create or use an existing AMI that includes the CloudWatch agent installed and configured.
Ensure the CloudWatch agent is configured to collect memory metrics.
Use this AMI for instances in the Auto Scaling group.
Reference: Collecting Metrics and Logs from Amazon EC2 Instances and On-Premises Servers with the CloudWatch Agent
A company is using an Amazon CloudWatch alarm lo monitor the FreeLocalStorage metric for an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL production database The alarm goes into ALARM state and indicates that the database is running low on temporary storage. A SysOps administrator discovers that a weekly report is using most of the temporary storage that is currently allocated.
What should the SysOps administrator do to solve this problem?
- A . Turn on Aurora PostgreSQL query plan management.
- B . Modify the configuration of the DB cluster to turn on storage auto scaling.
- C . Add an Aurora read replica to the DB cluster. Modify the report lo use the new read replica.
- D . Modify the DB instance class for each DB instance In the DB cluster to increase the instance size.
B
Explanation:
Storage Auto Scaling:
Aurora storage auto scaling automatically increases the storage capacity of the database cluster when free storage space is running low.
Steps:
Go to the AWS Management Console.
Navigate to RDS and select your Aurora DB cluster.
Modify the DB cluster configuration to enable storage auto scaling.
Apply the changes.
Reference: Aurora Storage Auto Scaling
A company runs workloads on 90 Amazon EC2 instances in the eu-west-1 Region in an AWS account. In 2 months, the company will migrate the workloads from eu-west-1 to the eu-west-3 Region.
The company needs to reduce the cost of the EC2 instances. The company is willing to make a 1-year commitment that will begin next week. The company must choose an EC2 Instance purchasing option that will provide discounts for the 90 EC2 Instances regardless of Region during the 1-year period.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
- A . Purchase EC2 Standard Reserved Instances.
- B . Purchase an EC2 Instance Savings Plan.
- C . Purchase EC2 Convertible Reserved Instances.
- D . Purchase a Compute Savings Plan.
D
Explanation:
To reduce the cost of EC2 instances with a 1-year commitment across different regions, purchasing a Compute Savings Plan is the most suitable option.
Compute Savings Plan:
Compute Savings Plans provide the most flexibility and help to reduce your costs by up to 66%, offering savings on a variety of EC2 instance usage.
These plans apply to usage across any AWS Region, and they also apply to AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate usage.
Flexibility Across Regions:
Unlike Reserved Instances, which are tied to a specific instance family and region, Compute Savings Plans provide savings across any EC2 instance usage, regardless of region, instance family, operating system, or tenancy.
This flexibility is ideal for the company’s requirement to migrate workloads from the eu-west-1 region to the eu-west-3 region within the commitment period.
Implementation:
Open the AWS Cost Management console.
Navigate to the "Savings Plans" section.
Purchase a Compute Savings Plan with a 1-year term.
Reference: AWS Savings Plans
Compute Savings Plans
The company wants to improve the security and high availability of a two-tier web application that was rehosted to AWS, currently in a single Availability Zone. (Select TWO):
- A . Place the web-tier instances in an Auto Scaling group. Configure the Auto Scaling group to support
a Multi-AZ deployment into private subnets that are behind an internet-facing Application Load Balancer. - B . Place the web-tier instances in an Auto Scaling group. Configure the Auto Scaling group in multiple AWS Regions. Deploy the EC2 instances into private subnets that are behind an internet-facing Application Load Balancer.
- C . Launch an additional EC2 instance to host SQL Server. Place the new database EC2 instance in a second AWS Region. Enable replication between the two database EC2 instances.
- D . Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to migrate the database EC2 instance to Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ Database Mirroring (DBM).
- E . Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to migrate the database EC2 instance to Amazon DynamoDB.
A, D
Explanation:
To improve security and availability, the best approach is to configure Multi-AZ for both the web and database tiers.
Multi-AZ Auto Scaling for Web Tier: Deploying the web-tier instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple AZs with an internet-facing ALB provides high availability and fault tolerance.
RDS Multi-AZ for SQL Server: Migrating the SQL Server to RDS with Multi-AZ deployment ensures database redundancy and failover without additional management overhead.
Placing the web tier in multiple Regions would add unnecessary complexity, and migrating the database to DynamoDB is not suitable for applications requiring SQL Server’s relational capabilities.
A SysOps administrator is evaluating Amazon Route 53 DNS options to address concerns about high availability for an on-premises website. The website consists of two servers: a primary active server and a secondary passive server. Route 53 should route traffic to the primary server if the associated health check returns 2xx or 3xx HTTP codes. All other traffic should be directed to the secondary passive server. The failover record type, set ID. and routing policy have been set appropriately for both primary and secondary servers.
Which next step should be taken to configure Route 53?
- A . Create an A record for each server. Associate the records with the Route 53 HTTP health check.
- B . Create an A record for each server. Associate the records with the Route 53 TCP health check.
- C . Create an alias record for each server with evaluate target health set to yes. Associate the records with the Route 53 HTTP health check.
- D . Create an alias record for each server with evaluate target health set to yes. Associate the records with the Route 53 TCP health check.
C
Explanation:
To configure Route 53 for high availability with failover between a primary and a secondary server, the following steps should be taken:
Create Health Checks:
Create HTTP health checks for both the primary and secondary servers. Ensure these health checks are configured to look for HTTP 2xx or 3xx status codes.
Reference: Creating and Updating Health Checks
Create Alias Records:
Create an alias record for the primary server. Set "Evaluate Target Health" to Yes. Associate this record with the primary server’s HTTP health check.
Create an alias record for the secondary server. Set "Evaluate Target Health" to Yes. Associate this record with the secondary server’s HTTP health check.
Reference: Creating Records by Using the Amazon Route 53 Console Set Routing Policy:
Ensure the routing policy for both records is set to "Failover."
Assign appropriate "Set IDs" and configure the primary record as the primary failover record and the secondary record as the secondary failover record.
Reference: Route 53 Routing Policies
Test Configuration:
Test the failover configuration to ensure that when the primary server health check fails, traffic is routed to the secondary server.
Reference: Testing Failover
A company is using an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster that has point-in-time recovery, backtracking, and automatic backup enabled. A SysOps administrator needs to be able to roll back the DB cluster to a specific recovery point within the previous 72 hours. Restores must be completed in the same production DB cluster.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
- A . Create an Aurora Replica. Promote the replica to replace the primary DB instance.
- B . Create an AWS Lambda function to restore an automatic backup to the existing DB cluster.
- C . Use backtracking to rewind the existing DB cluster to the desired recovery point.
- D . Use point-in-time recovery to restore the existing DB cluster to the desired recovery point.
C
Explanation:
"The limit for a backtrack window is 72 hours…..Backtracking is only available for DB clusters that
were created with the Backtrack feature enabled….Backtracking "rewinds" the DB cluster to the time
you specify. Backtracking is not a replacement for backing up your DB cluster so that you can restore it to a point in time….You can backtrack a DB cluster quickly. Restoring a DB cluster to a point in time
launches a new DB cluster and restores it from backup data or a DB cluster snapshot, which can take hours."
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/AuroraMySQL.Managing.Backtr ack.html
A SysOps administrator recently configured Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication on an S3 bucket.
Which of the following does this feature replicate to the destination S3 bucket by default?
- A . Objects in the source S3 bucket for which the bucket owner does not have permissions
- B . Objects that are stored in S3 Glacier
- C . Objects that existed before replication was configured
- D . Object metadata
D
Explanation:
Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) is a feature that automatically replicates objects across AWS regions. When CRR is configured, certain aspects are replicated by default, and some are not. Here are the details:
Objects in the source S3 bucket for which the bucket owner does not have permissions: CRR does not replicate objects for which the bucket owner does not have permissions.
Objects that are stored in S3 Glacier: Objects in the S3 Glacier storage class are not replicated by CRR.
Objects that existed before replication was configured: Only objects created or modified after the replication configuration will be replicated. Objects that existed before the configuration are not replicated by default.
Object metadata: CRR replicates the object metadata along with the object to ensure that the replica in the destination bucket is as accurate as possible.
Reference: Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication
Replication Configuration Examples
A company hosts an internal application on Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The instances are in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group. Employees use the application to provide product prices to potential customers. The Auto Scaling group is configured with a dynamic scaling policy and tracks average CPU utilization of the instances.
Employees have noticed that sometimes the application becomes slow or unresponsive. A SysOps administrator finds that some instances are experiencing a high CPU load. The Auto Scaling group cannot scale out because the company is reaching the EC2 instance service quota.
The SysOps administrator needs to implement a solution that provides a notification when the company reaches 70% or more of thte EC2 instance service quota.
Which solution will meet these requirements in the MOST operationally efficient manner?
- A . Create an AWS Lambda function that lists the EC2 instances, counts the EC2 instances, and compares the total number against the applied quota value by using the Service Quotas API. Configure the Lambda function to publish an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification if the quota utilization is equal to or greater than 70%. Create an Amazon EventBridge rule to invoke the Lambda function.
- B . Create an AWS Lambda function that lists the EC2 instances, counts the EC2 instances, and compares the total number against the applied quota value by using the Amazon CloudWatch Metrics API. Configure the Lambda function to publish an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification if the quota utilization is equal to or greater than 70%. Create an Amazon EventBridge rule to invoke the Lambda function.
- C . Use the Service Quotas console to create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm for the EC2 instances.
Configure the alarm with quota utilization equal to or greater than 70%. Configure the alarm to publish an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification when the alarm enters ALARM state. - D . Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm. Configure the alarm with a threshold of 70% for the CPUUtilization metric for the EC2 instances. Configure the alarm to publish an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification when the alarm enters ALARM state.
C
Explanation:
To monitor and receive alerts when the EC2 instance service quota usage reaches 70% or more:
Service Quotas Console: Navigate to the Service Quotas console within AWS and identify the specific quota for EC2 instances.
Create a CloudWatch Alarm: Directly from the Service Quotas console, set up a CloudWatch alarm for the EC2 instance quota metric. Configure the alarm to trigger when the quota utilization reaches or exceeds 70%.
Notification Setup: Link this alarm to an Amazon SNS topic that will send a notification to relevant stakeholders or systems when the quota usage threshold is breached.
This method provides an automated, straightforward way to monitor resource limits and ensures that stakeholders are promptly notified, enabling them to take proactive measures to manage the quota and prevent service disruption.
A SysOps administrator created an AWS Cloud Formation template that provisions Amazon EC2 instances, an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), and an Amazon RDS DB instance. During stack creation, the creation of the EC2 instances and the creation of the ELB are successful. However, the creation of the DB instance fails.
What is the default behavior of CloudFormation in this scenario?
- A . CloudFormation will roll back the stack and delete the stack.
- B . CloudFormation will roll back the stack but will not delete the stack.
- C . CloudFormation will prompt the user to roll back the stack or continue.
- D . CloudFormation will successfully complete the stack but will report a failed status for the DB instance.
A
Explanation:
The default behavior of AWS CloudFormation when the creation of a resource fails is to roll back the stack and delete the stack.
Stack Creation Failure:
If any resource within the stack fails to create, CloudFormation rolls back the stack by deleting all the resources that were successfully created up to the point of failure.
This ensures that no partially created resources are left in the user’s account.
Review the Events:
Open the CloudFormation console.
Select the stack and review the "Events" tab to identify the cause of the failure.
Reference: AWS CloudFormation Stack Rollback
Troubleshooting AWS CloudFormation
A company is using an AWS KMS customer master key (CMK) with imported key material The company references the CMK by its alias in the Java application to encrypt data The CMK must be rotated every 6 months
What is the process to rotate the key?
- A . Enable automatic key rotation for the CMK and specify a period of 6 months
- B . Create a new CMK with new imported material, and update the key alias to point to the new CMK.
- C . Delete the current key material, and import new material into the existing CMK
- D . Import a copy of the existing key material into a new CMK as a backup, and set the rotation schedule for 6 months
B
Explanation:
To rotate an AWS KMS customer master key (CMK) with imported key material every 6 months, follow these steps:
Create a New CMK with New Imported Material:
Generate new key material according to your security policies.
Create a new CMK in AWS KMS and import the new key material into this CMK.
Reference: Importing Key Material
Update the Key Alias:
Update the alias that your Java application references to point to the new CMK. This can be done via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs.
Aliases in KMS are used to refer to a key without having to use the key ID, making it easier to manage key rotation.
Reference: Working with Aliases
Test and Validate:
Ensure that the application can successfully encrypt and decrypt data using the new CMK.
Validate that the rotation process does not impact the application’s functionality.
By creating a new CMK and updating the alias, the administrator ensures the key is rotated without service disruption, maintaining compliance with security requirements.