Achieving AWS SysOps Associate: A First-Hand Experience with Cloud Infrastructure

A Brief History

I have been working with AWS for about 5 years now after joining a company that had recently migrated their on premises production systems into the cloud (a last minute covid decision). After 12 months I sat and passed the Developer Associate exam, a strange choice given my job title and department of Cloud Operations but I had my reasons and at the time was head strong about them.

I will write about my experiences with that certification at a later date but 3 years on it expired in March of 2025. Much more experienced in AWS and a wielding more knowledge of what I wanted out of my career I made the decision NOT to renew this certification, I knew however that I didn’t want to be without one. After some research I settled with the SysOps Associate certification, the key reasons were I have spent the last 12 months of my day to day operations working with AWS Systems Manager, Storage Gateway, Config and dabbled a little with CloudFormation (We mostly use Terraform).

These seemed like the key services that exam would touch upon and provided a shorter study path as I prefer real world experience over reading white papers anyway. After about a week of study and practice exams I sat and passed the SysOps Associate Exam in April 2025.

The AWS SysOps Associate Certification Overview

Where does this exam fit in?

This image was taken from the AWS Certification path a useful guide for the uninitiated or unsure on the certification path to take. I havent taken the Cloud Practitioner exam but having done the Developer one I can say that the SysOps one felt like a step up in terms of technical knowledge needed. Even with the real world experience with a chunk of these services it still took a solid full time week of study and practice exams to feel somewhat confident. The key thing to note is even though I have used them and are comfortable with the technologies the questions dont always reflect how I use them day to day.

I havent taken the step up yet to specialty or professional level certs but I am a good level of anxious about the step up from here, it certainly wont stop me by any means but I will be putting more effort in both practical and theory for those.

My Preparation

Study Schedule

A week of study is not much and for someone that has not touched the key services this exam tests on I would say definitely more time is needed. I will also mention that during my week it was all theory and practice exams with no labs or practical sessions, I was in a fortunate enough position that I have on the job practice with the key area’s that I was confident I didn’t need to click around the console anymore.

I blocked out a week of PTO from work and decided to dive in head first and treat the week as if I was working in the day and studying at night but dedicating all of that time to getting through the study materials and enough practice exams that I was confident in a pass. This method is not for everyone and its very intensive and tiring, I find it works well for me but I always say work to your learning strengths.

Resources

That week consisted of being on PTO and utilising my time as much as possible to get through the entirety of Stephanne Maarek’s Udemy course. I have used Stephanne’s content for both of my certifications and also gone through most of his solutions architect course. I couldnt recommend Stephanne enough, I find his explanations balanced, thorough and easy to understand with just enough information. I did have to watch his videos on 1.25 speed because I was finding his speaking to be a little slow for my taste but the fact the videos can be sped up or down means you can work through them whatever works best for you.

For practice exams I used tutorials dojo, I went through all of their timed, review and section based tests. They’re good for practicing but not perfect, for me some of the English in the questions is a bit off which almost certainly led to me choosing the wrong answer but this probably accounts for less than 3% of the total pool of questions. If anyone is aware of anything similar for this price range then let me know, I am not completely loyal to this like I am Stephanne’s courses. The main thing is though it gave me a platform to work through questions in a timed environment, that I 100% cant fault it on.

Key Exam Topics

Monitoring & Reporting

Cloudwatch is a big one here in particular ensuring that you know how to get custom metrics into CloudWatch and create appropriate alarms and alerting to them via SNS for email or phone notifications or EventBridge and Lambda specifically if it mentions reporting to Slack.

Also understanding the differences between the cost and usage analyser, trusted advisor and billing and which service is used for which purpose is going to help for 2 or 3 questions, it might just be my experience but these services can be easily missed in day to day operations.

High Availability and Elasticity

Fairly obvious one here but understanding scalable infrastructure through EC2 auto scaling groups, Route53 routing types and policies and multi AZ services with RDS are in my opinion the difference between a pass or fail. I had a lot of questions surrounding just these topics and the key takeaway was making sure that to read the question thoroughly before answering. For example some questions wanted the most efficient and others wanted the most cost effective, these simple things do change the answer that AWS is expecting to see.

Deployment & Automation

IaC questions were all CloudFormation based, which sounds obvious given that its the IaC service offered by AWS but in principle I havent spoken to any company that use it as their main IaC tool. This is the same for my workplace as we predominantly use Terraform to achieve this task. That being said the only thing I really had to learn was the structure and format that CloudFormation yaml expects, besides that most of the way its written I just linked to some Terraform concept (think nested stacks is similar to terraform modules etc.)

Automation was mostly surrounding Systems Manager Automation Documents, again it was not testing whether you could write one but more an understanding of what they are and when is a good use case for them. Systems Manager might be my favourite AWS service in general and has done a lot for streamlining my day to day operations so I highly recommend learning it in depth for any infrastructure operations team.

Security & Compliance

Security is possibly the dryest subject for me, theres just something about it that I dont gel with, that being said I recognise its importance and strive to ensure the operations I do manage adhere to best practices (it will be getting the 3am call if something goes down after all).

Surprisingly it was light on questions regarding Inspector and config and more heavy on WAF, Shield and CloudTrail. Honestly the biggest advice I have here is just know at a high level what each of these services does and what you should use it for, if you know this then you can most likely rule out the wrong answers leaving typically 1 or 2.

Networking

The bread and butter behind operations, if you dont have at least a basic understanding of networking concepts in AWS such as VPC, Subnets, IPv4 & v6, and security groups then it would be advisable to learn as much of that as possible. I think networking might be one of if not the broadest subjects in IT but the main tips I would say here are:-

• Learn about security group rules and NACL rules and how they work (SG’s being stateful and NACL being stateless).

• Understand how to configure a NAT Gateway for internet access in a private subnet.

• If a question is asking for IPv6 outbound internet then its always an egress only internet gateway.

• Use VPC Endpoints for private communication with AWS Services (learn the difference between interface and gateway endpoints)

• Understand when to use virtual private gateway over direct connect connection etc.

• Route53 endpoints and how to set them up for DNS connectivity between on premises and AWS.

Honestly I could talk about networking all day, I have been heavily involved in most of these topics for several years now so I didn’t study heavily in this area.

Overall

The image shows a breakdown of the domains and percentages you are tested on. I would recommend reading through the exam guide here.

The Exam Experience & Challenges

I chose to book the exam using Pearson Vue home proctoring, having no test centre close to me left me with no choice but let me tell you what to expect.

During the proctored exam, ensure your testing environment is clear of distractions and follow the proctor's instructions for setup. Use a personal device to avoid software conflicts, and be prepared for a thorough check of your surroundings. This preparation will help you start the exam smoothly and on time.

This whole process is easier if you just have a blank desk with nothing but the allowed items on it. I am speaking from experience here, during my first exam 3 years ago I did it on my company laptop and had 3 monitors, I wasnt able to pass the checks in their software and had major issues stopping the Nvidia service without cutting out the monitor(makes sense). Support were helpful but ultimatly I started the test nearly 40 minutes late and that did not help nerves. This time I was ready, I used my personal laptop that I tested the day before, I took the kitchen table to the corner of the room and had nothing on it but my laptop and a mouse. I was onboarded and started my exam 15 minutes before the scheduled start time.

I suppose I had to go through the issues the first time to know what to do and what not to do the second time round. I wish someone would have told me though, especially the dont use a company laptop tip, that one saved a huge headache the second time around.

Overall the exam was fine, I answered all of the questions in about an hour and then decided to end it there without checking them over. This might not be for everyone but for me, I found during the practice exam’s that I had a real talent for second guessing myself when reviewing my answers and changing right answers to wrong answers. I trusted my first instincts and it paid off.

The BIGGEST issue I had with the exam was waiting for my results, they tell you it could take up to 5 working days for the results to come through and they do NOT tell you if you have passed straight after (they did when I passed the Developer one 3 years ago). I’m sure AWS have their reasons and the 5 days seems like its just to give themselves a cusion during busier periods but honestly with them boasting automated scaling services this should be in my opinion close to instant results.

I am complaining about it but the reality of it was I finished my exam about 2.30pm and I got the results 7 hours later at 9.30pm. It showed up in certmetrics at least an hour before I got the email though, I had the notification from credly shortly after that. In the picture of 5 days 7 hours seems like a great turnaround but if you’re anything like me its an agonising wait, I was grateful to have the results before I went to bed though.

Reflections

I have had several days to reflect on the result now and organise my thoughts and feelings. Overall I passed and thats all that matters but cramming everything into a week was still pretty tough going even with the real world experience I had. There were no surprises throughout the whole experience and it was a step up from my previous learning with AWS.

I am happy its done and I have come away with a deeper understanding of most if not all of the topics I had learn about, even the ones I felt like I knew inside and out like Systems Manager. Translating this into my day to day activities should be easy as I use these services almost daily anyway, I think its going to give me more confidence in work to raise questions when I see infrastructure that isnt optimised, cost effective or scalable.

Tips

Honestly I kind of went through it already and it only applied to the first exam I did 3 years ago, but understanding the proctored exam format and exactly what Pearson Vue expect. That alone made the SysOps exam much more streamlined and comfortable experience.

The next thing is is you’re unsure of the answer try ruling out wrong answers, you’ll be suprised how many you can actually confirm wrong and bring it down to a 50/50.

Know your learning style and strengths and apply it. I mentioned that I crammed all of my learning and practice exams into a week. This worked for me mostly because I had the time and I was comfortable with a lot of these topics already, I took about 4 weeks for the Developer exam 3 years ago because I had much less pratical experience.

Give yourself time on the exam day to reflect on your learning before you start the exam, you might just get a question or two correct from a last minute cheat sheet review.

Conclusion

Working with AWS has been a transformative journey, deepening my appreciation for cloud technologies. The Developer Associate certification was a pivotal step in my career, opening doors and enhancing my technical foundation. Achieving the SysOps Associate certification has further solidified my expertise, equipping me with the confidence to optimize and innovate within my role. This certification not only validates my skills but also empowers me to contribute more effectively to my team's success. As I look forward to pursuing the DevOps Professional certification, I am excited about the opportunities to further expand my knowledge and impact in the field of cloud operations. The journey continues, and I am eager to embrace the challenges and advancements that lie ahead.