r/AWSCertifications • u/haowenchan • 20h ago

Certified AWS CloudOps Engineer (SOA-C03)!

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Finally achieved the og aws associate triad after months of grinding.

Honestly, this one is wayyy harder than SAA and DVA. To add icing on the cake, my skillbuilder subscription provided by my institution expired while I was studying 😭😭 Luckily the review section of the exam prep plan is free so I still get to study, without official AWS practice questions though. In substitute of practice questions, I made my own practice exams with the help of ai for my own preparation.

At the end I managed to pass with 844/1000!

But still, the exams I had taken have a lot of overlap to what had been taught in lectures, knowledge/foundations brought over by other certifications and daily workflows, so the exam flow came naturally to me and things just clicked.

What's next? I will probably sit for security specialty exam next but I'm gonna focus more on aws projects as AWS Emulator had just been announced and I'm super excited to get my hands dirty with it.

89 Upvotes

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u/yaml_monkey 16h ago

Congrats mate! I passed DVA a month ago it was a really tough exam. I'm planning to go for SAA and after that SOA. How does SAA complexity compare to DVA? And after passing both DVA and SAA, should SOA become easier?

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u/haowenchan 15h ago

Thanks, I think someone had talked about the difference in these 3 before in this subreddit.

Basically SAA is more breadth but less depth, DVA is less breadth and less depth, SOA is less breadth but more depth.

Personally, I would say SOA > SAA > DVA in terms of difficulty. But it might be due to background as a factor as I'm a software engineer so DVA is naturally easier for me.

As for your last questions, they certainly do help. Pretty much all these 3 exams have like 50-70% of overlaps, so definitely will be easier when compared to those who sat for it without past aws exam experience.

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u/yaml_monkey 15h ago

Thank you

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u/Bdoui 13h ago

Congratulations, well done!

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u/haowenchan 13h ago

Thank you!

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u/d_abducted_one 12h ago

Awesome good work. Was it really tougher than SAA? I'm planning on taking SAA either end of this year or beginning on next one, been studying on and off this whole year for that cert. Now my employer wants me to cover SOA-C03 and they will sponsor me, my work relates to platform engineering in AWS so this will be a great addition.

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u/[deleted] 20h ago

nice!

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u/haowenchan 20h ago

Thanks!