AWS SysOps Administrator study guide
AWS SysOps Administrator · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate is an intermediate-level AWS credential for people who operate workloads on AWS rather than only design them. It fits systems administrators, cloud operations and support engineers, and DevOps practitioners who are responsible for keeping production environments healthy: watching metrics and logs, responding to incidents, applying patches, managing backups and recovery, enforcing security controls, and keeping spend under control. The AWS SysOps Administrator study guide has 6 sections and about 2,026 words.
01Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation
CloudWatch is the operational hub. EC2 basic monitoring publishes every 5 minutes; detailed monitoring (paid) every 1 minute.
337 words, about 2 min02Reliability and Business Continuity
RPO is tolerated data loss; RTO is tolerated downtime. Every design question asks which strategy meets both at the lowest cost.
325 words, about 2 min03Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation
A CloudFormation template has Parameters (user input), Mappings (static lookups), Conditions, Resources (the only required section), and Outputs. Change sets preview update impact; drift detection reveals manual changes.
302 words, about 2 min04Security and Compliance
IAM evaluates in this order: an explicit deny anywhere wins, then an explicit allow in an identity or resource policy, otherwise implicit deny. SCPs in Organizations cap maximum permissions for member accounts but never grant.
341 words, about 2 min05Networking and Content Delivery
Plan CIDR ranges without overlap; each subnet lives in one AZ. Route tables choose the most specific matching route.
375 words, about 2 min06Cost and Performance Optimization
On-Demand suits spiky or short-lived workloads; Savings Plans cover steady compute (Compute SP is flexible across EC2, Fargate, and Lambda; EC2 Instance SP is tied to family and region); Reserved Instances suit predictable workloads, with Convertible RIs allowing family or OS changes; Spot suits fault-tolerant batch with a two-minute interruption notice and no capacity guarantee. Cost Explorer analyzes spend, Budgets alerts and can trigger actions, and the Cost and Usage Report feeds data lakes.
346 words, about 2 min