CCOA (IJCAHPO) case studies

CCOA · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The Certified Cloud Orchestration Architect (CCOA) is an independent credential for professionals who design, automate, and operate multi-service cloud platforms. It suits cloud architects, platform engineers, DevOps leads, and SREs who already work with at least one major provider and want to demonstrate that they can orchestrate infrastructure end to end rather than configure isolated services. The CCOA case studies are 5 cases and about 5,296 words.

Active-Passive Payments API With a 47-Minute Failover

A payments API runs in us-east-1 on ECS Fargate behind an ALB, with an Aurora MySQL Global Database, S3-stored statements, and a warm standby in eu-west-1. The contract promises a 15-minute RTO and a 5-minute RPO.

1,027 words, about 5 min 2

One Terraform State File for 1,200 Resources

The platform team manages 1,200 Terraform resources in a single S3 state with DynamoDB locking. Six engineers across three squads apply from laptops using long-lived admin access keys.

1,078 words, about 5 min 3

The EKS Upgrade That Stalled at 60 Percent

An EKS 1.26 cluster is being upgraded to 1.28. It has 60 managed nodes across three AZs, 40% Spot capacity, and 180 workloads.

1,057 words, about 5 min 4

Forty-Minute Pipelines and an 18 Percent Flake Rate

A 35-service monorepo on GitHub Actions runs the entire test suite on every pull request: 38-45 minutes wall clock across 11 parallel runners, with no dependency graph. Eighteen percent of runs end red on integration tests that pass on re-run, so developers re-run until green; median PR merge time is 2.5 days.

1,018 words, about 5 min 5

Observability Spend Above the Cost of the Cluster

After moving to a managed observability backend, the bill reached USD 38,000 per month. Prometheus scrapes 300 services every 15 seconds and holds 4.2 million active series; roughly 60% carry user id, request id, or full pod-name labels.

1,116 words, about 6 min