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How I Prepared for and Passed the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer — Associate Exam on My First Attempt

Hello everyone!
In this article, I want to share my personal experience on how I prepared for and passed the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer — Associate exam on my first attempt.

The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer — Associate exam was formerly known as AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate.

Exam Overview

The AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer — Associate exam validates skills in:

  • Monitoring and maintaining AWS workloads
  • Implementing security and networking controls
  • Optimizing cost and performance

Here are some quick exam details:

  • Exam duration: 130 minutes
  • Number of questions: 65
  • Exam fee: $150
  • Discounted fee: $75 if you have already passed another AWS exam

In terms of difficulty, I’d say it’s very reasonable for an associate-level certification. It’s definitely easy to pass if you prepare well!

Personally, it took me around two weeks to prepare. I studied for about one to two hours on workdays, and as much as I could over the weekends.

AWS Topics and Services That Appeared a Lot

The AWS CloudOps exam covers a wide range of services, with a strong focus on monitoring, compliance, and debugging.

Some services you really need to understand in depth are:

  • AWS Config
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • AWS CloudTrail
  • AWS Systems Manager (SSM)

One service that is often overlooked but shows up in the exam is Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics. You should understand how canaries work and the different types of canaries, because there are direct questions about this topic.

AWS Organizations and Centralized Logging

Many questions also test your knowledge of AWS organizational setups, including:

Debugging and AMI Scenarios

Debugging scenarios appear frequently covering different services, including Amaon Machine Images (AMIs).

To answer these questions correctly, you need to understand:

  • Permissions
  • Cross-account and cross-region sharing
  • Encrypted AMIs
IAM Sharing

For example, if an AMI is encrypted, sharing the AMI alone is not enough. You also need to share access to the customer-managed KMS key used for encryption.

Load Balancing, Scaling, and Networking

Expect questions about:

  • Auto Scaling Group (ASG) scaling policies
  • ALB vs NLB vs Global Accelerator

You need to understand when to use each one.
In general, knowing which services are regional and which are global helps you eliminate wrong answers quickly.

There are also questions related to:

  • CloudFront
  • DNS and Route 53

Make sure you know DNS record types and when to use them:

  • A
  • AAAA
  • CNAME
  • ALIAS

CloudFormation (Easy Points)

CloudFormation is a major topic on the exam and an easy way to secure points if you prepare well.

You should understand the purpose of:

  • StackSets
  • Stack drift
  • Change sets
  • cfn-signal and wait conditions

Service Integrations

Another easy win is understanding service integrations, such as:

  • Available destinations for S3 event notifications
  • Services that integrate with AWS Config for remediation

AWS Config is also a major service in the CloudOps exam context; make sure to develop a deep understanding for that services and its integrations with other services such as SSMs and Lambda.

Aurora Features

Aurora is tested more than I expected. You should be familiar with:

  • Backtracking (MySQL)
  • Point-in-time recovery
  • Multi-AZ clusters
  • Aurora Proxy

Some questions’s answers will try to trick you by mentioning “Backtracking for Postgres” while backtracking is only supported for MySQL.

Of course, the services are not limited to the ones I mentioned above, but these were definitely the dominant topics in my exam.

Courses and Study Materials

For preparation, I used the following resources:

Udemy — Stephane Maarek

  • Very good study material
  • Costs around $37 per month
  • You don’t need more than one month

The course content itself is solid and explains concepts clearly. However, in my opinion, the practice questions on Udemy are too easy and not very representative of the real exam.

AWS Skill Builder

I also studied and solved the practice exams on AWS Skill Builder.

  • Subscription costs $30 per month
  • The quality of questions is better than Udemy and closer to the real exam

Summary:

  • Udemy (Stephane Maarek): better course content
  • Skill Builder: better practice exam questions

You can find the links to both resources below.

My Post-Exam Experience

My post-exam experience this time was definitely unusual.

Normally, I get my results within 5 hours in the Pearson VUE portal. This time, nothing happened.

Three days later, the exam even disappeared from my pending list and exam history, as if I had never taken it.

I contacted both Pearson VUE and AWS, but I didn’t get any useful response.

Finally, on the fourth or fifth day, I received an email saying that I passed the exam successfully. When I checked the portal again, my certificate was back. It looked like an internal bug, but honestly, it was such a relief.

Final Thoughts

I hope these notes help you prepare for the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer — Associate exam; share your exam experience with us in the comments!

Resources

After logging into Skill Builder, search for:
“SkillBuilder Domain 1–5 Practice: AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer”
to access all five domain practice exams.

Author

Noor Sabahi

Senior AI & Cloud Engineer | AWS Ambassador

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