4. Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation (22%)

Deployment is where good intentions meet production reality. You can design a perfect architecture, but if your deployment process is manual, inconsistent, or poorly audited, you will introduce configuration drift, human error, and undocumented changes that erode that architecture over time. This domain tests your ability to provision and manage cloud resources as code — repeatable, auditable, and automated.

SOA-C03 expanded this domain significantly compared to its predecessor. The addition of AWS CDK, Terraform, and Git reflects how modern CloudOps roles have evolved: the expectation is no longer just "can you use CloudFormation?" but "can you reason about IaC tools, deployment pipelines, and operational automation at scale?"

The three task areas are: provision and maintain resources (Task 3.1 — AMI, ECR, CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, RAM, deployments) and automate existing resource management (Task 3.2 — Systems Manager, event-driven automation, Config). Expect 11 questions, with heavy emphasis on CloudFormation behavior, Systems Manager capabilities, and Config remediation patterns.