SOA-C03 syllabus: every exam domain and topic

Monitoring, logging and remediation

22%

Collecting metrics and logs, alarming, automating the fix, and tuning compute, storage and database performance.

Metrics, alarms and filters

CloudWatch, CloudTrail and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus for serverless, compute and AI workloads
The CloudWatch agent for EC2, ECS and EKS: memory, disk and log collection, and its configuration
Alarms that call services directly or through EventBridge, composite alarms and the actions each can invoke
Shareable dashboards across accounts and Regions with cross-account observability
Sending notifications through SNS and alarms that notify through SNS

Remediation and automation

Reading performance metrics and automating the fix with CloudWatch, Lambda, Systems Manager and CloudTrail, plus AI operations helpers such as Kiro and AWS DevOps Agent
EventBridge routing, enriching and delivering events, and troubleshooting rules that do not fire
Predefined and custom Systems Manager Automation runbooks

Performance optimization

Compute right-sizing and fixing performance problems using metrics, tags and tools such as Compute Optimizer
EBS metrics, volume types, and tuning for performance and cost
S3 performance: DataSync, Transfer Acceleration, multipart upload and lifecycle policies
Choosing and tuning shared storage: EFS, FSx and S3 Files, including EFS lifecycle policies
RDS monitoring with Performance Insights and alarms, and tuning with proactive recommendations and RDS Proxy
EC2 instances, attached storage and networking, including placement groups

22%

Scaling with demand, surviving failures, and recovering from data loss and disasters within the RTO and RPO.

Scalability and elasticity

High availability

Backup, restore and disaster recovery

Automating snapshots and backups for EC2, RDS, EBS, S3 and DynamoDB, with AWS Backup
Restore methods such as point-in-time recovery, chosen against RTO, RPO and cost
Versioning for S3 and FSx
DR strategies: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby and active/active

22%

Building and changing infrastructure with code, fixing failed deployments, and automating work on resources that already exist.

Images and infrastructure as code

Building and managing AMIs and container images with EC2 Image Builder
Creating and managing resources with CloudFormation and the AWS CDK
Finding and fixing deployment problems such as subnet sizing, CloudFormation errors and permissions

Multi-account and multi-Region delivery

Sharing and provisioning across Regions and accounts with AWS RAM and CloudFormation StackSets
Deployment strategies and the services that implement them
Third-party tools such as Terraform and Git

Automating existing resources

Systems Manager for operational tasks: Run Command, Patch Manager, State Manager and Maintenance Windows
Event-driven automation with Lambda, S3 Event Notifications, EventBridge and AWS DevOps Agent

16%

Applying IAM, multi-account controls, encryption and detective services, and acting on what they find.

18%

Building the network, protecting and pricing it, serving content and DNS, and tracing faults.