SOA-C03 practice questions

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Yes. All 15 SOA-C03 practice questions on this page are free, with instant scoring and a written explanation for each answer. You do not need an account and there is no time limit.

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Q: Are these questions the same as the real SOA-C03 exam?

No. These are original practice questions written to match the published exam objectives and difficulty. They are not real exam questions — sharing or reproducing live exam content breaches every certification body's candidate agreement and can void your certification.

Q: How should I use this practice test?

Use it as a readiness check rather than a study tool. Work through the questions without notes, read the explanation for every answer including the ones you got right, and treat any domain where you miss more than a third as the area to revise before booking your exam.

Question 1

A SysOps administrator needs to collect memory utilization metrics from a fleet of Amazon EC2 Linux instances and view them in Amazon CloudWatch. What is the required approach?

Accepted Answer

Memory is a guest-OS level metric that the hypervisor cannot see, so it must be collected by the CloudWatch agent running inside the instance and published as a custom metric. Detailed monitoring only increases the frequency of existing hypervisor-level metrics to 1 minute.

Question 2

An application writes logs to /var/log/app.log on EC2 instances. The operations team wants these logs searchable in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and retained for 90 days. Which combination of actions meets this requirement with the least operational effort?

Accepted Answer

The CloudWatch agent is purpose-built to tail on-instance log files into a log group, and log group retention settings automatically expire events after the configured 90 days. The other options either add unnecessary components or capture the wrong data.

Question 3

A SysOps administrator must be alerted when an application's custom CloudWatch metric stops being published entirely, because the reporting process sometimes crashes silently. The alarm currently stays in the INSUFFICIENT_DATA state and never notifies. What should the administrator do?

Accepted Answer

Treating missing data as 'breaching' forces the alarm into the ALARM state when no data points arrive, which is what triggers the SNS notification. INSUFFICIENT_DATA alarms do not invoke ALARM actions.

Question 4

Which Amazon RDS feature provides automatic failover to a standby database instance in a different Availability Zone during an infrastructure failure?

Accepted Answer

A Multi-AZ deployment maintains a synchronous standby in a second Availability Zone and fails over automatically by updating the DNS endpoint. Read replicas are asynchronous and require manual promotion.

Question 5

An Auto Scaling group spans three Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer. Instances pass EC2 status checks but the application on some of them returns HTTP 500 errors, and those instances are never replaced. What change fixes this?

Accepted Answer

By default an Auto Scaling group only uses EC2 status checks, which pass even when the application is failing; setting the health check type to ELB lets the load balancer's application-layer health check mark the instance unhealthy for replacement.

Question 6

A company must restore an entire production workload in a second AWS Region within 15 minutes of a disaster, with no more than a few seconds of data loss, while keeping steady-state cost as low as the RTO allows. Which disaster recovery strategy should the SysOps administrator implement?

Accepted Answer

Warm standby keeps a continuously running, scaled-down environment with live data replication, which supports a 15-minute RTO and seconds-level RPO while costing far less than active/active. Pilot light cannot reliably meet a 15-minute RTO because application capacity must first be provisioned.

Question 7

A SysOps administrator wants to apply operating system patches to hundreds of EC2 instances on a recurring schedule, with reporting on compliance status. Which AWS service capability should be used?

Accepted Answer

Patch Manager automates patch baselines, maintenance windows, and patch compliance reporting across managed instances at scale. Inspector reports vulnerabilities but does not install patches.

Question 8

A CloudFormation stack update fails partway through and the stack enters UPDATE_ROLLBACK_FAILED. The administrator must return the stack to a usable state without deleting it. What should be done first?

Accepted Answer

ContinueUpdateRollback retries the rollback and allows specific stuck resources to be skipped, moving the stack back to UPDATE_ROLLBACK_COMPLETE. Change sets cannot be executed while a stack is in UPDATE_ROLLBACK_FAILED.

Question 9

A team deploys the same CloudFormation template into 12 accounts across 3 Regions in an AWS Organization and needs new accounts to receive it automatically when they join an organizational unit. What should the SysOps administrator use?

Accepted Answer

Service-managed StackSets integrate with AWS Organizations and, with automatic deployment enabled, deploy stack instances to accounts as they are added to a target OU. Nested stacks and exports operate only within a single account and Region.

Question 10

An Amazon S3 bucket must be encrypted so that all new objects are protected and the encryption keys are managed by AWS with no additional configuration or cost. Which option meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

SSE-S3 is applied by default to all new objects at no extra charge and uses keys that AWS fully manages. Customer managed KMS keys add per-key and per-request costs, and SSE-C requires the client to supply the key on every request.

Question 11

A SysOps administrator must prove which IAM principal deleted a specific Amazon EBS volume three weeks ago and confirm the source IP address of the request. Which service provides this information?

Accepted Answer

CloudTrail records management API calls including the identity, timestamp, and sourceIPAddress of the DeleteVolume request, and CloudTrail Lake retains events well beyond the 90-day event history window. AWS Config shows configuration state changes but not the caller's IP address.

Question 12

An application running on EC2 in Account A must read objects from an S3 bucket in Account B. The instance role has s3:GetObject allowed on the bucket ARN, and the bucket policy grants access to the role ARN, but requests still fail with Access Denied. The objects were uploaded by a third account using SSE-KMS with a customer managed key. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

Reading an SSE-KMS encrypted object requires kms:Decrypt permission granted by the KMS key policy to the calling principal, in addition to S3 permissions. Without it, S3 returns Access Denied even though both S3 policies allow the action.

Question 13

Instances in a private subnet must download operating system updates from the internet but must not be reachable from the internet. What should the SysOps administrator configure?

Accepted Answer

A NAT gateway placed in a public subnet allows outbound IPv4 internet traffic from private subnets while blocking unsolicited inbound connections. An egress-only internet gateway provides that behavior for IPv6 only.

Question 14

Users report that a website served by Amazon CloudFront shows outdated content after a deployment, even though the objects in the Amazon S3 origin were updated. Which action resolves the issue immediately?

Accepted Answer

An invalidation removes the cached copies from CloudFront edge locations so the next request is fetched from the origin. Origin Shield adds a caching layer but does not expire already-cached objects.

Question 15

EC2 instances in subnet A cannot reach a database in subnet B on TCP 3306. The database security group allows inbound 3306 from the application security group, and the route table is correct. Packet flow shows the request reaching subnet B but no reply arriving back at subnet A. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

Network ACLs are stateless, so the return traffic to the client's ephemeral ports must be explicitly allowed inbound on the client subnet's ACL. Security groups are stateful and automatically permit return traffic, so option C is unnecessary.

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