Sysop Puns

This is my fist post on Reddit:) I had my AWS SysOps exam yesterday and got results today. Cleared exam on first attempt:)

Courses taken -

A Cloud Guru (not enough for sure)

u/jon-bonso-tdojo Practice exams (really helpful)

Hey everyone,

I'm taking my AWS SysOps exam next week and I'm curious to know where is the best place to practice labs that are very similar to the SysOps exam. Has anyone taken the SysOps C02 exam recently? I currently don't have any real world experience (job experience) working in AWS, however I do have my SAA. I am using Tutorial Dojo for the practice exam questions. ACloudGuru just uploaded some lab challenges on there SysOps course last month.. any idea if that is similar to the actual lab in the real exam?

thanks for reading this

Finally, after 5 months of on and off studying using u/acantril course and u/jon-bonso-tdojo practice exams, I took the exam last Saturday and passed :D

The exam result wasn't immediate (no on screen pass or fail message) maybe because of the lab but after 6 hours I received the email to claim my badge and the rest of the emails stating I passed followed thereafter.

I finished Adrian's SysOps course (which is awesome and I will certainly keep on doing the demos) before I took on Tutorials Dojo's practice exam. The first practice was really an eye opener haha. I had to revise my notes. The practice exam's really help. You have to really read it through and identify key words specially the "choose TWO answers" :D (missed some practice exam questions coz I tend to miss those).

I also bought Tutorials Dojo's Video Course (they were on sale) as quick review refresher nearing the exam date.

It would also be helpful to read the AWS User Guides as well like CloudWatch Using Metrics, Using Alarms etc.

The exam labs are okay. Adrian's demo and Tutorials Dojo's practice lab exam should have you covered.

I’ve failed twice like I said. I’ve been using tutorials dojo and adrian cantrills course the whole way. Is there another course I should look to get me over the edge? I scored 707 my most recent attempt. I’m encountering topics I haven’t seen in my current studies. Thanks in advance.

Context: The AWS certs I have are due to degree requirements of WGU. I never touched AWS before October I have CCNA, A+, Sec+, Project+, AWS CCP, and now SysOps. This is the first certification I’ve ever failed. I’m posting this because during my journey I was desperate for intel and there isn’t much out there about SOA-C02.

1st attempt prep: First I did Stephane Maarek’s udemy course (I recommend) 100% waaaaaaaay too fast, then I did Adrian Cantrill’s course (I HIGHLY recommend) 100% a littler faster than I should have then at the last minute I sped through Neal Davis’ Udemy course 100% (definitely worthwhile). I was getting mid 70s to mid 80s on most of the Tutorials Dojo practice exams. Everything I read told me that the hands on labs were easy if you were familiar with the concepts, so I decided to go for it. I failed. I scored in the high 600s I probably did marginally well enough on the questions but got my ass kicked on the labs. TAKE THE LABS SERIOUSLY. This probably isn’t as much of an issue if you deal with AWS for your job, but as a newcomer it’s easy to falsely think you can feel your way through most scenarios.

2nd attempt prep: I hammered down on the Tutorials Dojo practice exams (absolute necessity), and Neal Davis practice exams (HIGHLY recommend) on Udemy. I tested over and over and over. I mixed things up and spent significant time studying the explanations on my why my answers were wrong and why corrects ones were correct. I tried to spread things out so I wouldn’t memorize too many answers. I subscribed to whizlabs and practiced many of those labs in addition to doing test projects in my own AWS accounts. I paid $20 for whizlabs, and it was worth it. In my desperation I paid $75 for Neal Davis challenge labs a few days before my second attempt, I wouldn’t do that again.

Before my second attempt I was scoring in the high 80s to mid 90s on all Tutorials Dojo exams, and in the mid to high 80s on Neal Davis practice exams. I scored in the low 800s on my second attempt and passed.

Lab scenarios: I don’t want to give away too much but considering AWS has 200+ services, I think it is fucked up they don’t clue you in to areas to focus on. This is an ASSOCIATE, NOT PROFESSIONAL LEVEL EXAM! I’ve seen 6 unique lab scenarios. So….. understand how to set a cloudwatch alarm for an error code, know how to update a cloudformation stack including manipulating the JSON / YAML in a template on the fly. Practice things in eventbridge that might in

This is… officially my first post on Reddit, so hello?

My fanfiction is called Sysop, a Worm SI that starts in 2010 Brockton Bay. It revolves around him showing up with a shard-based Trump power, along with a few AU elements. It deals around the consequences of his presence, and the powers he’s developed. Trying to maneuver through his new life, one revolving around his displacement from Earth Bet, of getting pulled into the world of capes because of his power and the people he meets. Of trying to grapple with his problems of isolation and alienation on the foreign world of Bet.

I’ve been looking for a second person to give my story a read/run through for grammar and pacing issues/minor plot/character inconsistencies so I can maintain a more regular posting schedule. Preferably someone knowledgeable of Worm/Ward since I’m planning to use characters and elements from both. DM me, and we can work this out on Discord.

Ask Me Anything!

Most of the topics are already covered by the previous SysOps posts here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/?f=flair_name%3A%22AWS%20Certified%20SysOps%20Associate%22

I know this may be hard to define exactly but was wondering how much more studying (hours, labs, areas, etc.) is required to pass SysOps?

I passed the SAA-002 and is it realistic to pass SysOps with a week of studying?

I passed the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator exam this week and honestly, I liked the idea of having hands-on labs on the actual test. This will deter people who don't know how to do anything on AWS, from passing the test.

For those who are planning to take this test, here are the hands-on labs that I got. I think, it's not the same for all exam-takers, but might help you get an idea of what you're getting yourself into:

• Create CloudWatch Metric Filter
• Set up AWS Backup for EC2 and RDS
• Launch Amazon VPC with both public and private subnets plus NAT Gateway

For the multi-choice test, all relevant topics are enumerated in the Exam Guide so just read 'em up, review and you'll be fine:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sysops-associate/AWS-Certified-SysOps-Administrator-Associate_Exam-Guide.pdf

I used the Cantrill + Bonso combo and the courses really works well. Bonso's SysOps video course is more concise than Cantrill, but Cantrill has more hands-on labs that you can get practice on. I suggest taking Cantrill's course before taking Bonso's video course and practice exams, or vice versa whatever works for you.

For the actual hands-on, just stick with the AWS Free Tier account. Allocate about $20 for the entire exercise and don't launch unnecessary services which you don't understand the pricing. For example, for me, I played around the Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) feature in EBS and that triggers my AWS Budget Alarms since that feature is expensive as hell. Use "Shared" instance type in EC2, and not "Dedicated".

Next one for me is SA Pro.

I passed my SysOps exam over the weekend. I took my SA exam last month and figured I'd give the SysOps a go. I used u/acantril and u/jon-bonso-tdojo to study, as well as some projects at work.

The hilarious part is that I didn't bother reading the exam documentation and didn't realize there were labs involved. I did the several dozen questions and saw that I had 2 hours remaining. I thought about spending that extra time going over all of the questions again but figured "if I don't know it then staring at it for hours isn't going to make me suddenly know the answer". Then I clicked 'Next' and saw there was another section entirely for labs. Luckily the labs were pretty easy so I ended up passing.

Between 1983 to 1994, I was Sysop on Atari 8 bits beginning with an Atari 800XL at 300 baud. I tried several programs and settled with one written by Keith Ledbetter out of Georgia. It was flawless, never crashed. I ended up running 2400 baud, and after my 1050 disk drives quickly fried, ran the bbs in ram. Super fast! Ultimately I ran the board with an Atari St.

Anyone planning to give the SysOps at home, stay prepared for VM issues in the labs. Do try to finish the MCQ ASAP, try to keep some time for the labs because eventhough they are easy, working with it is a pain. I had to call the proctor twice, do not hesitate to call the proctor if you are even facing the smallest issue.

Exam Tips

If you have cleared SAA, you will be completely fine. Just the general layout, Stephane Maarek and TutorialsDojo. Plz Plz Plz do the TJs practice tests, they were a lot of questions similar to it. Buy the TJ test from their official website, the Udemy one's don't have lab practice.

Also opt for the 30 min extra accomodation thing, it will be very helpful. https://aws.amazon.com/certification/policies/before-testing/

Hi all,

Completion of C924 requires you to pass the AWS SysOps Associate certification. I found this to be one of the hardest classes at WGU, but looking back at it I honestly may have worked it up to be more than it was and stressed out about it waaaay more than I needed to. Don't make my same mistake! I had zero AWS experience, but was able to pass on the first attempt.

I started by reading around on what others did to pass the class. A consistent theme among many people, whether it was on Chatter or on Reddit, was this class was the hardest they had ever taken, or they were on their third attempt and were having a lot of issues. I honestly started to freak out a bit before I even started the class, and I was stressing a lot about it as I was studying which definitely didn't help. I got sick twice in a one month period, and I'm almost certain that stress from this class contributed to that. I want to emphasize again that my stress was misplaced. This class is 100% doable, you just need to be ready for the long haul. It took me about a month and a half to finish this class (everyone work at your own pace, but this was long for me). If you are near the end of your semester I would keep in mind that it may be a longer class, so be ready to finish it in the next semester or even wait to take it and work on something else that may be shorter.

BACKGROUND EXPERIENCE:

I did have to take C849 (Cloud Foundations) before this class, so I did hold the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner cert. This cert is really just a high level introduction to all AWS services, and I feel this didn't contribute much other than to familiarize me with AWS services.

I do have some experience in Azure and around 3-4 years of IT experience in the field, but the SysOps cert is very specific to AWS. I'll explain more below, but it requires specific knowledge in specific situations with AWS services.

RESOURCES USED:

I relied heavily on this post, but I'll detail resources below and my thoughts about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/WGU/comments/ko0m1q/c924_cloud_deployment_and_operations_class_tips/

First I started out using Stephane Mareek's udemy course. This is a very long course (25 hours) but free with WGU sign in. He has added videos for the v2 version of the test and as the AWS portal has updated. I watched ALL these videos (at 1.25 speed) and took notes. I needed to pa

What study material does everyone recommend for the SOA-C02? I'm having a difficult time finding material that isn't SOA-C01 as we appear to be in the middle of a refresh cycle.

I've seen a few posts on this sub stating that people have passed the SOA-C02. What material did you use? I generally like to find a video course and a book.

I learned this the other day through a post on The BBS Corner Facebook Group that Doug Rhea passed a couple months back. Below is the post and a link to the Funeral Home Guest Book for those who would like to leave his family and loved ones a message:

Very sad to hear of his passing and it's another huge loss for our community. 😢

Guest Book Link

Facebook Post by Steven Bennett on 12/22:

>I feel like I'm always the harbinger of doom, but this has been weighing on me lately.
>
>BBSFILES.COM was run by Doug Rhea for very many years. He gave us free registration codes for a lot of door games. It was the go-to place to find door games that were available to register, and a lot had free reg. codes. He ran the Game Master's Realm BBS for over 30 years. He was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in 2016, but kept providing keys and access to hundreds of BBS doors on his web site.
>
>I hadn't heard from Doug for a long time, and even mentioned it in some BBS groups. His actual BBS was down, but the web site was still active. After several months, he re-appeared, almost 6 months ago, stating that the cancer had taken a turn for the worse. He was in the hospital for 63 days, but thought he had a chance to beat it.
>
>Apparently, Doug didn't make it. BBSFILES.COM is down, and no emails have been answered (in months). It makes me sad that I seem to be the only one that has noticed.
>
>We have lost a great resource as SysOps. Both in the loss of Doug, and BBSFILES.COM. He spent a great deal of time and money acquiring all the BBS doors he could find, and providing those files to us.
>
>I have never heard anything offici

Why hasn't BBS server and client software evolved to include modern graphics/sounds/etc?

I was a BBS user back in the late 80s early 90s. I used Procomm Plus (my client software) to access BBSs local to me. I recently signed onto a BBS for the 1st time in almost 30 years. You have to have a client still today to access BBSs (Synchterm), so why haven't the clients and server software packages evolved? Web browser are required to browse the internet and websites...Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari have continued to add features along with the server side Apache, IIS, etc. Just wondering why the client/server packages for BBSs stalled.

I am on the people team an AWS Premier Partner. We are rapidly growing w/ a great culture. We are looking to add ~60 AWS technical roles and 10-20 overhead/support roles. Our firm has two offices in the Midwest, but our team has 100% remote mindset and we embody extreme flexibility. Must have AWS certifications. Hiring for culture fit and technical expertise. If you are AWS certified, let’s connect.

Passed the SOA-C02 Sysops Exam. Originally took the exam and did all the questions, then moved to the labs and was on the 2nd of 3 labs and the exam locked up and the test center attempted to revive the exam but it was considered "delivery failed" to AWS. Had to wait 6 days for AWS to investigate and eventually clear me for a retake without a recharge of the exam fee. Took the exam the next day and passed. Totally different set of questions and labs but I was totally prepared after going thru u/acantril AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Course and practice test and lab sims from u/jon-bonso-tdojo Last cert to finish my degree, but certainly wont be my last certification. Planning on moving on to the SAA next. Thank you Adrian and Jon for developing great study tools!

Hey Everyone, I’m looking for advice on how to pass this exam. I’m kinda losing my motivation here now at this point. I failed the exam three times now. I’ve been using a combination of A Cloud Guru and Tutorial Dojo’s practice exams. I’ve been hovering around the 687 score even though I was really confident in my third attempt. During the practice exams on the tutorial dojo, I get a scored around 85% per practice test set. I’m honestly not sure what I’m doing wrong here. Any advice would greatly help and if I should use any other new source for studying. Thank!

Took the exam last night and failed with a 707. This basically came down to failing by one question. I used Jon Bonso’s TD practice exams and labs and they were pretty helpful.

The labs I got were: create a VPC, create a backup plan, and create an ALB with ASG. They were very similar to the TD labs.

My issue is the labs were actually incredibly vague. I followed every step how they specified and results for the lab portion of the exam were “needs improvement”.

Has anyone else had this issue with the labs being vague and not providing much detail? Is it possible I went “above and beyond” and configured extra settings not asked for? I’m not really sure how the labs are graded or if they involve someone manually checking each lab VM.

So I said yesterday I’d update… and just heard back and it’s a pass!! Passed by 1 mark. Interestingly the questions felt a lot easier than they (clearly) were…

A couple of questions were quite tricky honestly… route 53 routing to on premise etc

For me, the TutorialsDojo practice exams really helped (lots of very similar questions) and so did their lab too, it was almost identical to one of the labs on the test…

Labs were basic, pretty easy and stuff a beginner could do on the AWS console, OnVUE makes it a bit of a pain with copy and pasting and caps lock…

Overall a great experience with a good result!

Just wanted to give a shout out to u/acantril and u/jon-bonso-tdojo for helping me get the certification.

This was my second associate exam after SAA so I had prior knowledge going in and My current role is focused on AWS, so that helped me with some hands-on experience.

I thought I did really well since the exam felt easy and so did the labs, but my score was around 770. So I may have made more mistakes than I thought I did. There were 3 lab sessions focusing on s3, Eventbridge and VPC's. I took the exam with PearsonVue and the experience was great.

I would definitely recommend learn.cantrill.io for its in-depth contents and labs and TD's practice exam to understand how the questions would be presented.

Thank you u/acantril and u/jon-bonso-tdojo

I passed the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator exam this week! Truly a "merry" Christmas for me, achieving this before 2021 finally ends.

I utilized my Christmas break to study full time in this test, but took me about 2 full months of on and off studying. Like others have said, the exam is a mix of multi-choice questions and 3 exam labs. I hold several Azure certifications so seeing the Exam Labs section doesn't surprise me. In comparison to Azure, the labs in AWS is definitely harder, since one lab can have 3 other subtasks that you have to answer.

One piece of advice that I can give is to adequately give yourself time to do the labs. That means, you have to do well on answering the multi-choice questions, and answer them correctly and as fast as possible, so you won't feel pressured when doing the labs.

This subreddit has lots of exam feedback for SysOps but most of them are just generic posts that don't contain enough info. Here are the two exam feedback posts that are really helpful in passing the exam:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/qgw6at/things_you_should_know_before_taking_the_aws/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/p59ku6/i_passed_the_new_sysops_soac02_exam_today_some/

Next Cert: Developer Associate DVA-C01!

Thinking about taken about the aws sysops administrator exam have anyone taken the exam what is some advice to pass the exam?

I have currently purchased both TJ's and Stephane practice test. TJ has 5 Lab Questions for practice while Stephane's one has none. Where can I find extra lab questions for practice?

I passed the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam over the weekend and just dropping by to share some tips to those who are planning to take this one too.

I got about 54 multi-choice questions, followed by 3 Exam Labs on CloudWatch, Amazon RDS and Amazon VPC. Each labs has its corresponding sub-tasks that you have to fulfill. The multi-choice exam is difficult IMO. I got several questions with certain AWS API and CloudWatch metrics on it, and I have to figure out which one to pick based on a limited information on the scenario. I don't think I would be able to pass this exam if I didn't throughly study.

Exam Prep Resources:

Adrian Cantrill video course - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️- Must have! Complete SysOps training and lots of demos that you can follow along. If you're taking the SysOps exam, focus on Adrian's lectures on CloudFormation, Systems Manager and CloudWatch.

Tutorials Dojo practice exams - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Superb quality. Has 300+ questions with extra 5+ exam labs. Terrific explanations as always and covers the new AWS services.

Official AWS practice exams - ⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Somewhat good. Contains 55-question practice exam with question-level feedback, but not as detailed as TD.

Tutorials Dojo video course - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️- Bought it on sale. Concise video course for SysOps and covers most topics in the exam, though they can improve their course by adding more lectures on CloudFormation and AWS Systems Manager.

Some tips to help you out:

• RTFM! Or in this case, read the official SysOps exam guide. It contains the list of the topics/services that you have to review, including the out-of-scope AWS services and features that you shouldn't study.
• Allocate enough time for the Exam Labs section at the latter part of the test. In other words, don't spend all your time doing the multi-choice questions, to the point that you'll lack time for the hands-on section.
• Practice, practice, practice! The TD course/tests and Cantrill's course have lots of demos that you can follow through. You have to force yourself to do your hands-on exercises on your AWS account. This helped me tremendously on my Exam Labs.

Hello Community

I am planning to take an exam AWS certified sysops administrator - associate (soa-c02) in 2022. As no prior experience in cloud, I currently started to understand basics with freeCodeCamp.org on youtube video AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification Course. Which courses do you think would help me to pass "sysops administrator - associate" exam? Courses on Skillsoft or Udemy courses? I would be happy to hear someone's learning path story. Thanks in advance!