Free SOA-C03: AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate Exam Questions and Answers

Last updated: September 19, 2026

Exam code

SOA-C03

Provider

Amazon

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1000+

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1. Question #1

   A company's website runs on an Amazon EC2 Linux instance. The website needs to serve PDF files from an Amazon S3 bucket. All public access to the S3 bucket is blocked at the account level. The company needs to allow website users to download the PDF files. Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST administrative effort?

   • A. Create an IAM role that has a policy that allows s3:list* and s3:get* permissions. Assign the role to the EC2 instance. Assign a company employee to download requested PDF files to the EC2 instance and deliver the files to website users. Create an AWS Lambda function to periodically delete local files.
   • B. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that uses an origin access control (OAC) that points to the S3 bucket. Apply a bucket policy to the bucket to allow connections from the CloudFront distribution. Assign a company employee to provide a download URL that contains the distribution URL and the object path to users when users request PDF files.
   • C. Change the S3 bucket permissions to allow public access on the source S3 bucket. Assign a company employee to provide a PDF file URL to users when users request the PDF files.
   • D. Deploy an EC2 instance that has an IAM instance profile to a public subnet. Use a signed URL from the EC2 instance to provide temporary access to the S3 bucket for website users.
   Reveal Answer

2. Question #2

   A company runs custom statistical analysis software on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. The software is highly sensitive to network latency between nodes, although network throughput is not a limitation. Which solution will minimize network latency?

   • A. Place all the EC2 instances into a cluster placement group.
   • B. Configure and assign two Elastic IP addresses for each EC2 instance.
   • C. Configure jumbo frames on all the EC2 instances in the cluster.
   • D. Place all the EC2 instances into a spread placement group in the same AWS Region.
   Reveal Answer

3. Question #3

   A company uses memory-optimized Amazon EC2 instances behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to run an application. The company launched the EC2 instances from an AWS-provided Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AMI. A CloudOps engineer must monitor RAM utilization in 5-minute intervals. The CloudOps engineer must ensure that the EC2 instances scale in and out appropriately based on incoming load. Which solution will meet these requirements?

   • A. Configure detailed monitoring for the EC2 instances. Configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances. Create an EC2 Auto Scaling group and Auto Scaling policy that is based on the mem_active metric.
   • B. Configure detailed monitoring for the EC2 instances. Use the mem_used_percent metric that the detailed monitoring feature provides. Create an IAM role that allows the CloudWatch agent to upload data. Create an EC2 Auto Scaling group and Auto Scaling policy that is based on the mem_used_percent metric.
   • C. Configure basic monitoring for the EC2 instances. Configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances. Create an IAM role that allows the CloudWatch agent to upload data. Create an EC2 Auto Scaling group and Auto Scaling policy that is based on the mem_used_percent metric.
   • D. Configure basic monitoring for the EC2 instances. Use the standard mem_used_percent metric for monitoring. Create an EC2 Auto Scaling group and Auto Scaling policy that is based on the mem_used_percent metric.
   Reveal Answer

4. Question #4

   A company is running an application on premises and wants to use AWS for data backup. All of the data must be available locally. The backup application can write only to block- based storage that is compatible with the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX). Which backup solution will meet these requirements?

   • A. Configure the backup software to use Amazon S3 as the target for the data backups.
   • B. Configure the backup software to use Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval as the target for the data backups.
   • C. Use AWS Storage Gateway, and configure it to use gateway-cached volumes.
   • D. Use AWS Storage Gateway, and configure it to use gateway-stored volumes.
   Reveal Answer

5. Question #5

   A company hosts a static website in an Amazon S3 bucket, accessed globally via Amazon CloudFront. The Cache-Control max-age header is set to 1 hour, and Maximum TTL is set to 5 minutes. The CloudOps engineer observes that CloudFront is not caching objects for the expected duration. What is the reason for this issue?

   • A. The Expires header has been set to 3 hours.
   • B. Cached assets are not expiring in the edge location.
   • C. Cache invalidation is missing in the CloudFront configuration.
   • D. Cache-duration settings conflict with each other.
   Reveal Answer

6. Question #6

   An ecommerce company uses Amazon ElastiCache (Redis OSS) for caching product queries. The CloudOps engineer observes a large number of cache evictions in Amazon CloudWatch metrics and needs to reduce evictions while retaining popular data in cache. Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

   • A. Add another node to the ElastiCache cluster.
   • B. Increase the ElastiCache TTL value.
   • C. Decrease the ElastiCache TTL value.
   • D. Migrate to a new ElastiCache cluster with larger nodes.
   Reveal Answer

7. Question #7

   A company has an application running on EC2 that stores data in an Amazon RDS for MySQL Single-AZ DB instance. The application requires both read and write operations, and the company needs failover capability with minimal downtime. Which solution will meet these requirements?

   • A. Modify the DB instance to be a Multi-AZ DB instance deployment.
   • B. Add a read replica in the same Availability Zone where the DB instance is deployed.
   • C. Add the DB instance to an Auto Scaling group that has a minimum capacity of 2 and a desired capacity of 2.
   • D. Use RDS Proxy to configure a proxy in front of the DB instance.
   Reveal Answer

8. Question #8

   A company's reporting job that previously ran in 15 minutes is now taking 1 hour. The application runs on Amazon EC2 and extracts data from an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. CloudWatch metrics show high Read IOPS even when reports are not running. The CloudOps engineer must improve performance and availability. Which solution will meet these requirements?

   • A. Configure Amazon ElastiCache and query it for reports.
   • B. Deploy an RDS read replica and update the reporting job to query the reader endpoint.
   • C. Create a CloudFront distribution with the RDS instance as the origin.
   • D. Increase the size of the RDS instance.
   Reveal Answer

9. Question #9

   A company is performing deployments of an application at regular intervals. Users report that the application sometimes does not work properly. The company discovers that some users' browsers are fetching previous versions of the JavaScript files. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The ALB is the origin for an Amazon CloudFront distribution. A SysOps administrator must implement a solution to ensure that CloudFront serves the latest version of the JavaScript files. The solution must not affect application server performance. Which solution will meet these requirements?

   • A. Reduce the maximum TTL and default TTL of the CloudFront distribution behavior to 0.
   • B. Add a final step in the deployment process to invalidate all files in the CloudFront distribution.
   • C. Add a final step in the deployment process to invalidate only the changed JavaScript files in the CloudFront distribution.
   • D. Remove CloudFront from the path of serving JavaScript file
   • E. Serve the JavaScript files directly through the ALB.
   Reveal Answer

10. Question #10

    A company uses AWS Organizations to manage a set of AWS accounts. The company has set up organizational units (OUs) in the organization. An application OU supports various applications. A CloudOps engineer must prevent users from launching Amazon EC2 instances that do not have a CostCenter-Project tag into any account in the application OU. The restriction must apply only to accounts in the application OU. Which solution will meet these requirements?

    • A. Create an IAM group that has a policy that allows the ec2:RunInstances action when the CostCenter-Project tag is present. Place all IAM users who need access to the application accounts in the IAM group.
    • B. Create a service control policy (SCP) that denies the ec2:RunInstances action when the CostCenter-Project tag is missing. Attach the SCP to the application OU.
    • C. Create an IAM role that has a policy that allows the ec2:RunInstances action when the CostCenter-Project tag is present. Attach the IAM role to the IAM users that are in the application OU accounts.
    • D. Create a service control policy (SCP) that denies the ec2:RunInstances action when the CostCenter-Project tag is missing. Attach the SCP to the root OU.
    Reveal Answer