AWS Certified Sysops Administrator — Associate Practice Exam Questions

Are you ready to take the AWS Sysops Administrator — Associate Certification? Test yourself with the following free questions!

Gonzalo Fernandez Plaza
8 min readApr 16, 2024

The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate certification is valuable for individuals looking to demonstrate their expertise in deploying, managing, and operating workloads on the AWS platform. This certification helps organizations identify and nurture talent with critical skills needed for successful cloud initiatives.

The SOA-C02 exam has 65 questions in total and a 130-minute time frame, including multiple-choice, multiple-answer questions. To help you pass this certification, let’s practice with these free questions!

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Certification — Free Practice Questions
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Certification — Free Practice Questions

Remember that you can find almost 200 AWS Sysops Administrator — Associate practice questions at FullCertified. Practice now with our exam simulator!

PRACTICE QUESTIONS:

A company plans to use AWS CloudFormation to deploy multiple environments across multiple AWS Regions using a single template that can be reused for each environment deployment. What is the recommended approach to fulfill this requirement?

A) Use nested stacks to provision the resources.

B) Use change sets to provision additional environments.

C) Use parameters to provision the resources.

D) Use cross-stack references to provision the resources.

Solution: C. You can use parameters to pass values to your template when creating or updating a stack to customize each deployment. This is how parameters look in a CloudFormation template:

Parameters:   
InstanceType:
Type: String
Default: t4g.small
AllowedValues:
- t4g.small
- t4g.medium
- m1.large
Description: Enter t4g.small, t4g.medium, or m1.large

How can a SysOps Administrator easily identify potential cost savings by downsizing underutilized Amazon EC2 instances with MINIMAL effort?

A) Use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to identify EC2 instances with low utilization.

B) Run an AWS Lambda function that checks for utilization of EC2 instances.

C) Use AWS Budgets to generate alerts for underutilized EC2 instances.

D) Use AWS Cost Optimization Hub to generate resource optimization recommendations.

Solution: D. In the past, AWS Cost Explorer to generate resource optimization recommendations. However, by the end of 2023, AWS introduced AWS Cost Optimization Hub, a new AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that helps you consolidate and prioritize cost optimization recommendations across your AWS Organizations member accounts and AWS Regions.

You can easily identify, filter, and consolidate over 15 types of AWS cost optimization recommendations, such as EC2 instance rightsizing recommendations, exactly what they are asking about in this question.

You can see it in the following image (via aws.amazon.com):

AWS Cost Optimization Hub (via aws.amazon.com)
AWS Cost Optimization Hub (via aws.amazon.com)

How can a company ensure each department operates within its own isolated environment while only allowing pre-approved AWS services?

A) Use an AWS Organization to create accounts for each department and apply service control policies (SCPs) to control access to pre-approved services.

B) Create IAM policies for each department that grant access to specific services and attach them to the user accounts.

C) Create a catalog of services that are approved for use by each department in AWS Service Catalog.

D) Create Security Groups to isolate each department’s resources and configuring IAM policies to restrict access to pre-approved services.

Solution: A. You can create AWS accounts using the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI command “aws organizations create-account”.

After that, you can limit the AWS services that the users can use in that account using Service Control Policies (SCPs), as they are a great tool to implement control and governance across your organization.

In the following image, you can see an example of an AWS Organization:

AWS Organizations OUs
AWS Organizations OUs

Which actions are allowed for the IAM user based on the policy that has been attached to this user?

{
"Version":"2012-10-17",
"Statement":[
{
"Effect":"Allow",
"Action":"rds:Describe*",
"Resource":"*"
},
{
"Effect":"Allow",
"Action":"ec2:*",
"Resource":"*",
"Condition":{
"StringEquals":{
"ec2:Region":"us-east-1"
}
}
},
{
"Effect":"Deny",
"NotAction":[
"ec2:*",
"s3:GetObject"
],
"Resource":"*"
}
]
}

A) Amazon RDS DescribeDBInstances action in the us-east-1 Region.

B) Amazon S3 PutObject operation in a bucket named testbucket.

C) Amazon EC2 DescribeInstances action in the us-east-1 Region.

D) Amazon EC2 AttachNetworkInterface action in the eu-west-1 Region.

Solution: C. Find the explanation at FullCertified!

Each week, data needs to be loaded into an application for analysis. Multiple offices worldwide upload this data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Unfortunately, latency issues are impeding the upload process, causing delays in the analytics job. What is the SIMPLEST way to improve upload times?

A) Upload to a local Amazon S3 bucket within each region and enable Cross-Region Replication (CRR)

B) Use S3 Multi-part upload.

C) Utilize a traditional file transfer protocol (FTP) for the uploads.

D) Upload using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Solution: D. Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration can speed up content transfers to and from Amazon S3 by as much as 50–500% for long-distance transfer of larger objects. Using S3 Multi-part upload is incorrect, as it will perform multiple uploads in parallel; however, S3 Transfer Acceleration will result in a much-improved performance in this case. The other options won’t speed up the process and will add more latency.

How can a SysOps Administrator prevent accidentally terminating several critical Amazon EC2 instances?

A) Use AWS Systems Manager to restrict EC2 termination.

B) Use AWS Config to restrict EC2 termination.

C) Disable all user access to the Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Console.

D) Enable termination protection on the EC2 instances.

Solution: D. If EC2 termination protection is enabled, the instance can’t be terminated using the console, API, or CLI until termination protection is disabled. By default, this option is turned off for EC2 instances.

Termination Protection for EC2 Instances
Termination Protection for EC2 Instances

A company is planning to securely manage one-time fixed license keys in AWS. The company’s development team needs to access the license keys in automaton scripts running in Amazon EC2 instances and AWS CloudFormation stacks. Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

A) Amazon S3 Glacier with encrypted files prefixed with “config”

B) AWS Secrets Manager secrets with a tag that is named SecretString.

C) AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store SecureString parameters.

D) CloudRotation parameters.

Solution: C. AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store is a capability of AWS System Manager, and it provides a secure and scalable solution for storing and retrieving configuration data, including sensitive information like license keys. By using SecureString parameters (any sensitive data that needs to be stored and referenced in a secure manner), the license keys can be securely stored and encrypted at rest. AWS Secrets Manager secrets could be a viable alternative, but Secrets Manager is typically better suited for managing secrets that require more advanced features like automatic rotation, apart from being more expensive.

A company runs a serverless application on AWS Lambda, which utilizes an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance to store data. Recently, the application has encountered frequent “too many connections” errors when the Lambda function tries to connect to the database. The company has already maximized the max_connections value within the database configuration. What action should a SysOps administrator take to address these errors?

A) Modify the Lambda function to utilize a NoSQL database like Amazon DynamoDB instead of MySQL RDS to handle data storage requirements.

B) Scale up the Lambda function’s memory to a higher value.

C) Re-adjust the value of the max_connect_errors parameter within the database’s parameter group settings.

D) Deploy an Amazon RDS Proxy to create a proxy layer. Update the Lambda function’s connection string accordingly.

Solution: D. Amazon RDS Proxy is a fully managed, highly available database proxy service specifically designed to address challenges related to database connections, scalability, and resilience. You create a proxy layer between the Lambda function and the MySQL RDS instance by deploying the RDS Proxy.

Instead of creating a new database connection for each request, RDS Proxy pools and reuses connections, reducing the number of connections required to be opened and closed by the Lambda function. It can handle a large number of concurrent connections more effectively.

To integrate both services, you only need to update the Lambda function’s connection string to point to the RDS Proxy endpoint instead of directly to the MySQL RDS instance. You can see an example in the following image:

RDS Proxy Schema
RDS Proxy Schema

A company is expanding its use of AWS services across its portfolios and wants to provision AWS accounts for each team to ensure a separation of business processes for security, compliance, and billing. The provisioning of accounts and their setup should be executed in a scalable and efficient manner to ensure that new accounts are established with predefined baselines and governance policies. A SysOps administrator needs to design a provisioning process that saves time and resources.
Which action should be taken to meet these requirements?

A) Use AWS Control Tower to create a template in Account Factory and use the template to provision new accounts.

B) Automate using AWS CloudFormation to provision the AWS accounts, set up infrastructure, and integrate with AWS Organizations.

C) Use AWS Config to provision accounts and deploy instances using AWS Service Catalog.

D) Use AWS BeanStalk to provision accounts and deploy instances using AWS Service Catalog.

Solution: A. AWS Control Tower is a service designed specifically for provisioning and managing AWS accounts in a scalable and efficient manner, while also ensuring governance and compliance. The Account Factory feature within AWS Control Tower allows the creation of account templates that enforce predefined baselines and governance policies when new accounts are provisioned.
AWS Config is primarily used for resource inventory. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service for deploying and managing applications, not for provisioning AWS accounts. AWS CloudFormation does not provide the same level of governance and compliance features as AWS Control.

Amazon Glacier will be used to archive the data to comply with a company’s policy requirement to retain data for a minimum of 7 years. Which configuration option should be used to meet the compliance requirement?

A) A Glacier data retrieval policy.

B) A Glacier vault lock policy.

C) A Glacier vault access policy.

D) A Glacier vault notification.

Solution: B. Just as an example, the following policy denies deletion permissions for archives less than 7 years old (2555 days). It denies the glacier:DeleteArchive action on the ‘example’ vault.

{
"Version":"2012-10-17",
"Statement":[
{
"Sid":"DENY-DELETION-7-YEARS",
"Principal":"*",
"Effect":"Deny",
"Action":"glacier:DeleteArchive",
"Resource":[
"arn:aws:glacier:eu-west-1:123456789012:vaults/example"
],
"Condition":{
"NumericLessThan":{
"glacier:ArchiveAgeInDays":"2555"
}
}
}
]
}

Amazon S3 Glacier defines different condition keys that can be used in the Condition element of an IAM policy. One of them is glacier:ArchiveAgeInDays. You can see the others at the following link.

More Questions?

That’s all for now! Do you want more questions? FullCertified is the perfect resource for you if you want more practice!

  • You can find more than 700 AWS practice exam questions, including detailed explanations.
  • Access to a real exam simulator to thoroughly prepare for the exam.
  • You can download all of them on PDF.
  • Download the ultimate cheat sheet for the AWS Sysops Administrator — Associate exam!

Visit FullCertified today and get the most out of your certification preparation!

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Gonzalo Fernandez Plaza

Computer Science Engineer & Tech Lead 🖥️. Publishing AWS & Snowflake ❄️ courses & exams. https://www.fullcertified.com