About This Study Plan

This 90-day study plan breaks the SOA-C03 (AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate) exam preparation into 3 focused study sessions with a total of 15 actionable tasks. The plan covers all 5 exam domains — Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization, Reliability and Business Continuity, Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation, Security and Compliance, Networking and Content Delivery — ensuring complete coverage of the exam blueprint. A deeper 90-day plan for building AWS CloudOps confidence before taking the SOA-C03 exam.

3Study Sessions

15Total Tasks

5Domains Covered

Prerequisites

Basic cloud concepts and beginner AWS familiarity
30-60 minutes of study time per day
AWS account access for optional operational labs

Study Schedule

Month 1 (Days 1-30)Operations Foundations and Monitoring

Week 1: EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, and CloudWatch basics
Week 2: CloudWatch metrics, alarms, logs, dashboards, and log queries
Week 3: CloudTrail, AWS Config, X-Ray, EventBridge, and operational analysis
Week 4: Systems Manager, remediation automation, and performance optimization
End of month: Monitoring quiz and flashcards

Month 2 (Days 31-60)Reliability, Deployment, and Security

Week 5: High availability, Auto Scaling, ELB, Route 53 failover, and backups
Week 6: RDS resilience, snapshots, AWS Backup, restore testing, RPO, and RTO
Week 7: CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, CodeDeploy, and deployment strategies
Week 8: IAM, KMS, Config, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Inspector, WAF, and compliance evidence
End of month: Reliability, deployment, and security mixed quiz and notes cleanup

Month 3 (Days 61-90)Networking and Exam Readiness

Week 9: VPC routing, NAT, endpoints, flow logs, security groups, and NACLs
Week 10: Route 53, resolver endpoints, Direct Connect, VPN, Transit Gateway, ELB, and CloudFront
Week 11: Full mock exam #1 and detailed review
Week 12: Full mock exam #2, flashcards, cheat sheets, and weak-domain review
Final days: One light mixed quiz and rest before exam day