SOA-C03 Amazon Web Services AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate Free Practice Exam Questions (2026 Updated)

AWS CloudOps automation best practices recommend using AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup for organization-wide management and configuration of EC2 instances. The Default Host Management Configuration Quick Setup automatically enables Systems Manager capabilities such as Patch Manager, Inventory, Session Manager, and Automation across all managed instances within the organization.

When deployed from the management account, Quick Setup automatically integrates with AWS Organizations to propagate configuration and permissions to existing and future accounts. This meets the requirement for organization-wide management with no manual configuration or SSH access. AWS documentation notes:

“You can use Quick Setup in the management account of an organization in AWS Organizations to configure Systems Manager capabilities for all accounts and Regions. Quick Setup automatically keeps configurations up to date.”

Options B, C, and D require custom deployments or manual IAM updates, lacking centralized automation. Therefore, Option A fully satisfies CloudOps standards for automated provisioning and ongoing management of EC2 instances across an organization.

High availability requires removing single-AZ risk and eliminating manual recovery. The AWS Reliability best practices state to design for multi-AZ and automatic healing: Auto Scaling “helps maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances” (AWS Auto Scaling User Guide). The Reliability Pillar recommends to “distribute workloads across multiple Availability Zones” and to “automate recovery from failure” (AWS Well-Architected Framework – Reliability Pillar). Attaching the Auto Scaling group to an ALB target group enables health-based replacement: instances failing load balancer health checks are replaced and traffic is routed only to healthy targets. Using an AMI in a launch template ensures consistent, repeatable instance configuration (AWS EC2 Launch Templates). Options A and C keep all instances in a single Availability Zone and rely on manual or ad-hoc restarts, which do not meet high-availability or resiliency goals. Option B only scales vertically and adds a restart rule; it neither removes the single-AZ failure domain nor provides automated replacement. Therefore, creating a multi-AZ EC2 Auto Scaling group with a launch template and attaching it to the ALB target group (Option D) is the CloudOps-aligned solution for resilience and business continuity.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Doocuments:

Use Amazon S3 Event Notifications with AWS Lambda to trigger image processing on object creation. S3 natively supports invoking Lambda for events such as s3:ObjectCreated:*, providing a serverless, low-latency pipeline without managing additional services. AWS operational guidance states that “Amazon S3 can directly invoke a Lambda function in response to object-created events,” allowing you to pass event metadata (bucket/key) to the function for resizing and writing results back to S3. This approach minimizes operational overhead, scales automatically with upload volume, and integrates with standard retry semantics. SNS or SQS can be added for fan-out or buffering patterns, but they are not required when the requirement is simply “invoke the Lambda function on upload.” CloudWatch alarms do not detect individual S3 object uploads and cannot directly satisfy per-object triggers. Therefore, configuring S3 → Lambda event notifications meets the requirement most directly and aligns with CloudOps best practices for event-driven, serverless automation.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Security documentation confirms that AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is designed to protect web applications from application-layer threats, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities.

When integrated with an Application Load Balancer, AWS WAF inspects incoming traffic using rule groups. The AWS Managed Rules for SQL Injection Protection provide preconfigured, continuously updated filters that detect and block malicious SQL patterns.

AWS Shield (Standard or Advanced) defends against DDoS attacks, not application-layer SQL attacks, and vulnerability scanners (Option C) only detect, not prevent, exploitation.

Thus, Option D provides the correct, managed, and automated protection aligned with AWS best practices.

CloudWatch Logs data protection provides native redaction/masking of sensitive data at ingestion and query. AWS documentation states it can “detect and protect sensitive data in logs” using data identifiers, and that authorized users can “use the unmask action to view the original data.” Creating a data protection policy on the log group masks PII by default for all viewers, satisfying the requirement to redact personal information. Granting only the security team permission to invoke the unmask API operation ensures that unredacted content is restricted. Option B (KMS) encrypts at rest but does not redact fields; encryption alone does not prevent plaintext visibility to authorized readers. Options A and D add complexity and latency, move data out of CloudWatch, and do not provide default inline redaction/unmask controls in CloudWatch itself. Therefore, the CloudOps-aligned, managed solution is to use CloudWatch Logs data protection with appropriate data identifiers and unmask permissions limited to the security team.

Per the AWS Cloud Operations and EventBridge documentation, when events are sent across AWS accounts — particularly from multiple accounts in an AWS Organization — the target event bus in the receiver account must include a resource-based policy that explicitly allows events:PutEvents API calls from the sender accounts or the organization ID.

Even if the sender accounts have IAM permissions to call PutEvents, the receiving event bus must trust those accounts via a resource policy. Without this configuration, EventBridge automatically rejects incoming cross-account events, and those events never reach the target Lambda function for processing.

AWS guidance states that “Cross-account event delivery requires a resource-based policy on the event bus that grants permissions to the source accounts or organization.” The policy can include either individual AWS account IDs or the organization’s root ID.

In this scenario, because the events originate from multiple accounts and there is no resource policy on the target event bus to authorize those sender accounts, the events are not delivered.

Therefore, the correct cause is C – the resource-based policy on the target event bus must be modified to allow PutEvents API calls from the sender accounts.

Per the AWS Cloud Operations and Data Protection documentation, S3 Object Lock enforces write-once-read-many (WORM) protection on objects for a defined retention period.

There are two modes:

Compliance mode: Even the root user cannot delete or modify objects during the retention period.

Governance mode: Privileged users with special permissions can override lock settings.

For regulatory or audit requirements that prohibit deletion, Compliance mode is the correct choice. When configured with a 3-month retention period, all backup objects are protected from deletion until expiration, ensuring compliance with data retention mandates.

Versioning (Option C) alone does not prevent deletion. IAM-based restrictions (Option A) lack time-based enforcement and require manual intervention. Governance mode (Option D) is less strict and unsuitable for regulatory retention.

Thus, Option B is the correct CloudOps solution for immutable S3 backups.

The most secure pattern is to use an IAM role for Amazon EC2 with the minimum required permissions. AWS guidance states: “Use roles for applications that run on Amazon EC2 instances” and “grant least privilege by allowing only the actions required to perform a task.” By attaching a role to the instance, short-lived credentials are automatically provided through the instance metadata service; this removes the need to create long-term access keys or embed secrets. Granting only sqs:SendMessage, sqs:ReceiveMessage, and sqs:DeleteMessage against the specific SQS queues enforces least privilege and aligns with CloudOps security controls. Options A and B rely on IAM user access keys, which contravene best practices for workloads on EC2 and increase credential-management risk. Option C uses a role but grants sqs:*, violating least-privilege principles. Therefore, Option D meets the security requirement with scoped, temporary credentials and precise permissions.

AWS CloudOps governance best practices emphasize centralized account management and preventive guardrails. AWS Control Tower integrates directly with AWS Organizations and provides “Region deny controls” and “Service Control Policies (SCPs)” that apply automatically to all existing and newly created member accounts. SCPs are organization-wide guardrails that define the maximum permissions for accounts. They can explicitly deny actions such as launching EC2 instances in a specific Region, or block root user access.

To prevent CloudTrail log deletion, SCPs can also include denies on cloudtrail:DeleteTrail and s3:DeleteObject actions targeting the CloudTrail log S3 bucket. These SCPs ensure that no user, including administrators, can violate the compliance requirements.

AWS documentation under the Security and Compliance domain for CloudOps states:

“Use AWS Control Tower to establish a secure, compliant, multi-account environment with preventive guardrails through service control policies and detective controls through AWS Config.”

This approach meets all stated needs: centralized enforcement, automatic propagation to new accounts, region-based restrictions, and immutable audit logs. Options A, B, and D either detect violations reactively or lack complete enforcement and automation across future accounts.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The correct answer is D because target tracking scaling policies are designed to automatically maintain a specific metric at a desired target value with the least administrative effort. AWS CloudOps documentation states that target tracking works like a thermostat, continuously adjusting capacity to keep the selected metric close to the defined target.

By specifying a target value of 40% average CPU utilization, the Auto Scaling group automatically scales out or in based on real-time demand without requiring manual thresholds, multiple alarms, or predefined scaling steps. This approach is fully managed by AWS and is the most operationally efficient option.

Option A is incorrect because scheduled scaling is based on predictable traffic patterns and cannot respond dynamically to real-time load changes. Option B is incorrect because simple scaling reacts only after an alarm is triggered and does not continuously maintain a target value. Option C is less efficient because step scaling requires additional configuration and tuning of scaling steps.

AWS CloudOps best practices clearly recommend target tracking scaling policies for maintaining steady performance metrics with minimal operational overhead.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and EC2 Connectivity documentation, EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint allows access to instances without internet exposure or open SSH ports. However, for successful connectivity, the EC2 instance must have Systems Manager permissions through an IAM instance profile.

If no IAM instance profile is attached, the instance cannot establish a control channel with the Systems Manager service, and EC2 Instance Connect cannot authenticate the session.

Opening port 22 (Option B) is unnecessary and contradicts the private subnet design. HTTPS rules (Option A) are irrelevant because EC2 Instance Connect communicates through AWS APIs, not direct HTTPS connections. Recreating the instance with a key pair (Option D) bypasses the intended keyless connection mechanism.

Therefore, Option C — attaching an IAM instance profile with Systems Manager permissions — enables secure, private access through EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint.

Tagging is essential for governance, cost management, and automation in CloudOps operations. The AWS Organizations tag policies feature allows centralized definition and enforcement of required tag keys and accepted values across all accounts in an organization. According to the AWS CloudOps study guide under Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation, tag policies enable automatic validation of tags, ensuring consistency with minimal manual overhead.

Once tagging consistency is enforced, enabling cost allocation tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console allows accurate cost distribution per business unit. AWS documentation states:

“Use AWS Organizations tag policies to standardize tags across accounts. You can activate cost allocation tags in the Billing console to track and allocate costs.”

Option B introduces unnecessary complexity with Lambda automation. Option C detects but does not enforce tagging. Option D limits flexibility to Service Catalog resources only. Therefore, Option A provides a centrally managed, automated, and low-overhead solution that meets CloudOps tagging and cost-tracking requirements.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Systems Manager documentation states that to use Session Manager privately within a VPC (without internet access), three interface VPC endpoints must be configured:

com.amazonaws.<</b>region>.ssm – enables Systems Manager core API communication.

com.amazonaws.<</b>region>.ec2messages – allows the agent to send and receive messages between EC2 and Systems Manager.

com.amazonaws.<</b>region>.ssmmessages – enables real-time interactive communication for Session Manager connections.

These endpoints ensure secure, private connectivity over the AWS network, eliminating the need for public internet routing.

Endpoints for S3, Step Functions, or EC2 API (Options C, E, F) are not required for Session Manager functionality.

Thus, the correct combination is A, B, and D, aligning with AWS CloudOps best practices for secure, private Systems Manager access.