AWS Renamed SysOps Administrator to CloudOps Engineer (SOA-C03): What Changed

If you have been planning to sit the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam, the certification you are thinking of no longer exists under that name. AWS announced the rename on July 15, 2025, opened registration for the replacement exam on September 9, 2025, retired the old SOA-C02 exam on September 29, 2025, and launched the new AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate (SOA-C03) on September 30, 2025.

If you already hold the SOA-C02 credential, nothing changes for you — your certification stays valid under its original name until it expires, and you are not required to retake anything early. This post is for anyone who has not sat the exam yet and needs to know what to study.

Why the Rename

AWS says the change reflects how the role has evolved. “SysOps Administrator” described a narrower, more traditional systems administration function. “CloudOps Engineer” better matches what the job actually looks like today: less server babysitting, more automation, containers, and infrastructure as code.

What Actually Changed in the Exam

The core numbers stayed the same: 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored), 130 minutes, a $150 registration fee, and a minimum passing score of 720 out of 1000.

What did change:

The hands-on lab component is gone. SOA-C02 required completing 2-3 timed tasks in a live AWS console. SOA-C03 removes this entirely — it is now a pure multiple-choice/multiple-response exam like every other AWS associate-level certification. If you were dreading the lab section, that pressure is off. If you were counting on hands-on tasks to offset weaker theory knowledge, note that every point now comes from questions.

Domains went from six to five, and weights shifted:

SOA-C02 (retired)	SOA-C03 (current)
Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation (20%)	Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization (22%)
Reliability and Business Continuity (16%)	Reliability and Business Continuity (22%)
Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation (18%)	Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation (22%)
Security and Compliance (16%)	Security and Compliance (16%)
Networking and Content Delivery (18%)	Networking and Content Delivery (18%)
Cost and Performance Optimization (12%)	(folded into Domain 1)

The standalone cost/performance domain is gone — performance optimization now lives inside the monitoring domain, and cost analysis itself was moved out of scope for this exam level entirely.

Containers are explicitly in scope. ECS, EKS, ECR, and Fargate are now testable, along with the CloudWatch agent configuration for collecting metrics and logs from ECS and EKS clusters — content that did not exist on SOA-C02.

Infrastructure as code goes deeper. SOA-C03 adds creating and managing CloudFormation and AWS CDK stacks explicitly, on top of the CloudFormation knowledge already required on SOA-C02.

A few things were removed or moved. S3 static website hosting configuration was dropped from the content outline. VPN configuration moved from the security domain into the networking domain. And the old cost/performance domain’s content was redistributed into the monitoring domain.

What This Means for Your Study Plan

If you were using SOA-C02 study material — courses, practice questions, or study guides published before late 2025 — it is now out of date on three fronts: it will walk you through lab practice you no longer need, it will under-cover containers and CDK, and its domain weightings will misallocate your study time.

We have updated our SOA-C03 study guide to reflect the current exam guide, including the revised domain weights and the new container and IaC content. If you started preparing before the rename, re-check your source material before your exam date.

The Bigger Pattern

This is not the first time AWS has renamed or restructured a certification mid-cycle, and it will not be the last. If you are deep into preparation for any AWS exam, it is worth a quick check of the official AWS Certification documentation for the current exam guide before you lock in a study plan — exam codes, domain weights, and even certification names can shift with only a few months’ notice.