SOA-C03 Sample Questions Answers

The AWS Cloud Operations and Infrastructure-as-Code documentation specifies that when using AWS CloudFormation, resources are created in parallel by default unless explicitly ordered using DependsOn.

If a custom resource (Lambda) depends on another resource (like an EC2 instance) to exist before execution, a DependsOn attribute must be added to enforce creation order. This ensures the EC2 instance is launched and available before the custom resource executes its automation logic.

Updating the service token (Option B) doesn’t affect order of execution. The cfn-response module (Option C) handles callback communication but not sequencing. Fn::If (Option D) is for conditional creation, not dependency control.

Therefore, Option A is correct — adding a DependsOn attribute guarantees that CloudFormation provisions the EC2 instance before executing the Lambda custom resource.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Governance documentation defines that enabling Organizational View in AWS Health allows the management account in AWS Organizations to view and aggregate health events from all member accounts.

This feature provides a single-pane-of-glass view of service health issues, account-specific events, and planned maintenance across the organization — without requiring additional automation or data pipelines.

Alternative options (B, C, and D) require custom integration and ongoing maintenance. CloudTrail does not natively forward AWS Health events, and custom Lambda or DynamoDB approaches increase complexity.

Therefore, Option A — enabling the Organizational View feature in AWS Health — is the most operationally efficient and AWS-recommended solution.

Per the AWS Cloud Operations and Service Catalog documentation, when a portfolio is shared across AWS accounts, the recipient account imports the shared portfolio.

The recipient CloudOps engineer cannot modify the original products or their configurations but can:

Add products from the imported portfolio into their local portfolios for deployment,

Control end-user access in the recipient account, and

Manage local constraints or permissions.

However, the recipient cannot edit, delete, or reconfigure the shared products (Options B, C, and D). The source (owner) account retains full administrative control over products, launch roles, and lifecycle policies.

This model aligns with AWS CloudOps principles of centralized governance with distributed self-service deployment across multiple accounts.

Thus, Option A is correct—imported portfolios allow the recipient to add products to a local portfolio but not alter the shared configuration.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Doocuments:

With simple scaling policies, an Auto Scaling group performs one scaling activity when the alarm condition is met, then observes a default cooldown period (300 seconds) before another scaling activity of the same type can begin. CloudOps guidance explains that cooldown prevents rapid successive scale-outs by allowing time for the newly launched instance(s) to register with the load balancer and impact the metric. Even if the alarm breaches multiple times during the cooldown window, the group waits until the cooldown completes before evaluating and acting again. In this case, although RequestCountPerTarget exceeded the threshold twice within 180 seconds, the group will launch a single instance and then wait for cooldown before any additional scale-out can occur. Options A, C, and D do not reflect the behavior of simple scaling with cooldowns; A describes step/target-tracking-like behavior, and C/D are not Auto Scaling mechanics.

References (AWS CloudOps Documents / Study Guide):

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling – Simple Scaling Policies and Cooldown (User Guide)

• Elastic Load Balancing Metrics – ALB RequestCountPerTarget (CloudWatch Metrics)

• AWS Well-Architected Framework – Performance Efficiency & Operational Excellence

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Networking documentation, instances in a private subnet do not have a direct route to the internet gateway and thus require a NAT gateway for outbound internet access.

The correct configuration is to create a NAT gateway in the public subnet, associate an Elastic IP address, and then update the private subnet’s route table to send all 0.0.0.0/0 traffic to the NAT gateway. This enables instances in the private subnet to initiate outbound connections while keeping inbound traffic blocked for security.

Placing the NAT gateway inside the private subnet (Options C or D) prevents connectivity because it would not have a route to the internet gateway. Configuring routes from the public subnet to the NAT gateway (Option B) does not serve private subnet traffic.

Hence, Option A follows AWS best practices for enabling secure, managed, outbound-only internet access from private resources.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Systems Manager documentation states that to use Session Manager privately within a VPC (without internet access), three interface VPC endpoints must be configured:

com.amazonaws.<region>.ssm – enables Systems Manager core API communication.

com.amazonaws.<region>.ec2messages – allows the agent to send and receive messages between EC2 and Systems Manager.

com.amazonaws.<region>.ssmmessages – enables real-time interactive communication for Session Manager connections.

These endpoints ensure secure, private connectivity over the AWS network, eliminating the need for public internet routing.

Endpoints for S3, Step Functions, or EC2 API (Options C, E, F) are not required for Session Manager functionality.

Thus, the correct combination is A, B, and D, aligning with AWS CloudOps best practices for secure, private Systems Manager access.

As per AWS Cloud Operations, Bedrock, and Governance documentation, AWS CloudTrail is the authoritative service for capturing API activity and audit trails across AWS accounts. For Amazon Bedrock, CloudTrail records all user-initiated API calls, including interactions with agents, knowledge bases, and generative AI model parameters.

Using CloudTrail Lake, organizations can store, query, and analyze CloudTrail events directly without needing to export data. CloudTrail Lake supports SQL-like queries for generating audit and compliance reports, enabling the company to retrieve information such as user identity, API usage, timestamp, model or agent ID, and invocation parameters.

In contrast, CloudWatch focuses on operational metrics and log streaming, not API-level identity data. OpenSearch or Flink would add unnecessary complexity and cost for this use case.

Thus, the AWS-recommended CloudOps best practice is to leverage CloudTrail with CloudTrail Lake to maintain auditable, queryable API activity for Bedrock workloads, fulfilling governance and compliance requirements.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Security documentation specifies that for Amazon CloudFront, automatic certificate renewal is only supported for certificates issued by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). When a certificate is managed by ACM and validated through DNS validation, ACM automatically renews the certificate before expiration without requiring manual intervention.

Option A ensures that the certificate is issued and managed by ACM, enabling full integration with CloudFront. Option E (DNS validation) is essential for automation; AWS performs revalidation automatically as long as the DNS validation record remains in place.

By contrast, email validation (Option D) requires manual user confirmation upon renewal, which prevents automatic renewals. Certificates issued by third-party certificate authorities (Option B) are manually managed and must be reimported into ACM after renewal. CloudFront does not have a direct feature (Option C) to renew certificates; it relies on ACM’s lifecycle management.

Thus, combining ACM-issued certificates (A) with DNS validation (E) ensures continuous, automated renewal with no downtime or human action required.

Per the AWS Cloud Operations and Data Protection documentation, S3 Object Lock enforces write-once-read-many (WORM) protection on objects for a defined retention period.

There are two modes:

Compliance mode: Even the root user cannot delete or modify objects during the retention period.

Governance mode: Privileged users with special permissions can override lock settings.

For regulatory or audit requirements that prohibit deletion, Compliance mode is the correct choice. When configured with a 3-month retention period, all backup objects are protected from deletion until expiration, ensuring compliance with data retention mandates.

Versioning (Option C) alone does not prevent deletion. IAM-based restrictions (Option A) lack time-based enforcement and require manual intervention. Governance mode (Option D) is less strict and unsuitable for regulatory retention.

Thus, Option B is the correct CloudOps solution for immutable S3 backups.

High availability requires removing single-AZ risk and eliminating manual recovery. The AWS Reliability best practices state to design for multi-AZ and automatic healing: Auto Scaling “helps maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances” (AWS Auto Scaling User Guide). The Reliability Pillar recommends to “distribute workloads across multiple Availability Zones” and to “automate recovery from failure” (AWS Well-Architected Framework – Reliability Pillar). Attaching the Auto Scaling group to an ALB target group enables health-based replacement: instances failing load balancer health checks are replaced and traffic is routed only to healthy targets. Using an AMI in a launch template ensures consistent, repeatable instance configuration (AWS EC2 Launch Templates). Options A and C keep all instances in a single Availability Zone and rely on manual or ad-hoc restarts, which do not meet high-availability or resiliency goals. Option B only scales vertically and adds a restart rule; it neither removes the single-AZ failure domain nor provides automated replacement. Therefore, creating a multi-AZ EC2 Auto Scaling group with a launch template and attaching it to the ALB target group (Option D) is the CloudOps-aligned solution for resilience and business continuity.

References (AWS CloudOps Documents / Study Guide):

• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) Exam Guide: Domain 2 – Reliability and Business Continuity

• AWS Well-Architected Framework – Reliability Pillar

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide – Health checks and replacement

• Elastic Load Balancing User Guide – Target group health checks and ALB integration

• Amazon EC2 Launch Templates – Reproducible instance configuration

AWS Secrets Manager natively supports credential management and automatic rotation for Amazon RDS master user passwords. When a secret is associated with an RDS instance, Secrets Manager automatically updates the password both in the secret and on the database, without downtime or manual scripting.

AWS documentation confirms:

“AWS Secrets Manager can automatically rotate the master user password for Amazon RDS databases. Rotation is fully managed and integrated, requiring no custom code or maintenance.”

Option A introduces unnecessary Lambda automation. Option B and C use Parameter Store, which does not provide direct RDS password rotation. Therefore, Option D achieves secure, automatic credential rotation with least operational effort, fully aligned with CloudOps security automation principles.

References (AWS CloudOps Documents / Study Guide):

• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) Exam Guide – Domain 4: Security and Compliance

• AWS Secrets Manager – Rotating Secrets for Amazon RDS

• AWS Well-Architected Framework – Security Pillar

• Amazon RDS User Guide – Managing Master User Passwords

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Identity Management documentation, when configuring federation between IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) and an external SAML 2.0 identity provider, two key prerequisites are required:

The IAM Identity Center SAML metadata file — This is uploaded to the external IdP to establish trust, define SAML endpoints, and enable identity federation.

The IdP metadata (including the public X.509 certificate) — This information is imported into IAM Identity Center to validate authentication assertions and encryption signatures.

IAM Identity Center and the IdP exchange this metadata to mutually establish secure, bidirectional federation.

Network-level details such as IP addresses (Option C) are unnecessary. Root access (Option D) or permissions to member accounts (Option E) are not required; only Control Tower or IAM administrative permissions in the management account are needed for setup.

Thus, the correct answer is A and B — the SAML metadata from both sides is required for federation.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Monitoring documentation states that Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights provides a purpose-built query engine for analyzing and visualizing log data directly within CloudWatch. For Lambda, all invocation results (including errors) are automatically logged to CloudWatch Logs.

By querying these logs with CloudWatch Logs Insights, the CloudOps engineer can efficiently count the number of “ERROR” or “Exception” occurrences over the past 7 days using simple SQL-like commands. This method is serverless, cost-efficient, and real-time.

Athena (Options A and B) would require exporting data to Amazon S3, and OpenSearch (Option D) adds unnecessary operational complexity.

Thus, Option C provides the most efficient and native AWS CloudOps approach for rapid Lambda error analysis.

The most secure pattern is to use an IAM role for Amazon EC2 with the minimum required permissions. AWS guidance states: “Use roles for applications that run on Amazon EC2 instances” and “grant least privilege by allowing only the actions required to perform a task.” By attaching a role to the instance, short-lived credentials are automatically provided through the instance metadata service; this removes the need to create long-term access keys or embed secrets. Granting only sqs:SendMessage, sqs:ReceiveMessage, and sqs:DeleteMessage against the specific SQS queues enforces least privilege and aligns with CloudOps security controls. Options A and B rely on IAM user access keys, which contravene best practices for workloads on EC2 and increase credential-management risk. Option C uses a role but grants sqs:*, violating least-privilege principles. Therefore, Option D meets the security requirement with scoped, temporary credentials and precise permissions.

References (AWS CloudOps Documents / Study Guide):

• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) Exam Guide – Security & Compliance

• IAM Best Practices – “Use roles instead of long-term access keys,” “Grant least privilege”

• IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 – Temporary credentials for applications on EC2

• Amazon SQS – Identity and access management for Amazon SQS

Per the AWS Cloud Operations, Monitoring, and Automation documentation, the correct workflow for automated operational remediation is:

Amazon CloudWatch Agent is installed on each EC2 instance (Option A) to collect local log data and push it to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

A CloudWatch Metric Filter (Option C) is then defined to identify specific error strings or patterns within those logs (e.g., “HTTP 5xx” or “Service Unavailable”). When such an event occurs, CloudWatch Alarms are triggered.

Upon alarm activation, Amazon EventBridge rules (Option E) are configured to respond automatically by invoking an AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook, which executes an action to restart the web server process on the affected instance via SSM Agent.

This approach aligns directly with AWS’s recommended CloudOps remediation pattern, known as event-driven automation, which ensures minimal downtime and eliminates manual intervention.

Options involving CloudTrail (B) or SES notifications (D) are incorrect because they are unrelated to log-based application monitoring and automated remediation workflows.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and ElastiCache documentation, cache evictions occur when the cache runs out of memory and must remove items to make space for new data.

To reduce evictions and retain frequently accessed items, AWS recommends increasing the total available memory — either by scaling up to larger node types or scaling out by adding shards/nodes. Migrating to a cluster with larger nodes is the simplest and most efficient solution because it immediately expands capacity without architectural changes.

Adjusting TTL (Options B and C) controls expiration timing, not memory allocation. Adding a single node (Option A) may help, but redistributing data requires resharding, introducing more complexity.

Thus, Option D provides the lowest operational overhead and ensures high cache hit rates by increasing total cache memory.