PAS-C01 Mock Exam 93 — 25 Questions

Question 1

A company is running SAP ERP on AWS using an SAP-certified AMI. The system uses a single EC2 instance for both the application and database. The operations team needs to implement a disaster recovery (DR) solution with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour. The DR site must be in a different AWS Region. Currently, the system uses EBS snapshots for backup. What should the team do to meet the RTO and RPO requirements?

Accepted Answer

Schedule hourly EBS snapshots and copy them to the DR region using AWS Backup.. Option D is correct because using AWS Backup with cross-region snapshot copy allows automated backups to another region with RPO of 1 hour. For RTO, you can restore from those snapshots. Option A is wrong because S3 replication is for objects, not EBS snapshots. Option B is wrong because Cross-Region Replication is for S3. Option C is wrong because CloudEndure requires continuous replication, which is not needed and may be overkill.

Answer

Set up a read replica in the DR region and promote it during failover.

Answer

Configure Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication for the EBS snapshots.

Answer

Use AWS CloudEndure Disaster Recovery to replicate the entire server to the DR region.

Question 2

A company has an SAP HANA database running on an RDS for SAP HANA instance. The operations team wants to automate the backup process and retain backups for 90 days. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Backup. Option A is correct because AWS Backup can manage backups of RDS instances with customizable retention. Option B is wrong because S3 is for object storage, not native RDS backups. Option C is wrong because Storage Gateway is for hybrid storage. Option D is wrong because RDS automated backups have a max retention of 35 days; manual snapshots are needed beyond that, but AWS Backup can manage them.

Answer

RDS automated backups

Answer

Amazon S3 lifecycle policies

Answer

AWS Storage Gateway

Question 3

A company runs SAP BusinessObjects on AWS. The system includes a web application server and a CMS database on separate EC2 instances. The operations team receives alerts that the CMS database server's EBS volume is approaching its maximum capacity. The volume is a gp3 EBS volume with 3000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput. Upon investigation, the team finds that the volume is 90% full and write performance has degraded. The application is experiencing slow response times. What should the team do to resolve the issue without downtime?

Accepted Answer

Expand the EBS volume size and extend the file system.. Option B is correct because expanding the volume size increases available capacity and also increases baseline performance for gp3 (more capacity = more throughput). This can be done without downtime. Option A is wrong because modifying IOPS alone does not increase capacity. Option C is wrong because converting to io2 might not be necessary and could increase cost. Option D is wrong because moving to instance store is not recommended for persistent data and requires downtime.

Answer

Move the database to an instance store volume for better performance.

Answer

Migrate the database to an io2 Block Express volume with higher performance.

Answer

Increase the IOPS and throughput of the existing volume.

Question 4

A company runs SAP on AWS and uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to a fleet of EC2 instances running SAP Web Dispatcher. The ALB has a target group with health checks configured on port 8080. Recently, the operations team noticed that some instances are being deregistered due to health check failures. The instances are healthy and the Web Dispatcher is running. The health check response time is consistently below 2 seconds. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The health check interval is too short, causing the threshold to be exceeded.. Option B is correct because the health check threshold may be set too low, causing false positives. Option A is wrong because if the path were wrong, all health checks would fail. Option C is wrong because the ALB health checks come from its own IPs, not the internet. Option D is wrong if the instances are healthy.

Answer

The security group for the instances blocks inbound traffic from the internet.

Answer

The instances are running out of memory.

Answer

The health check path is incorrect.

Question 5

A company has an SAP system running on AWS with a production database on an RDS for SAP ASE instance. The operations team needs to perform a minor version upgrade of the database engine. The upgrade must be applied with minimal downtime. The team has a maintenance window scheduled for the upcoming weekend. Which action should the team take to apply the upgrade?

Accepted Answer

Enable auto minor version upgrade on the DB instance and let the upgrade occur during the maintenance window.. Option A is correct because setting the AutoMinorVersionUpgrade flag to true allows RDS to apply minor upgrades automatically during the maintenance window with minimal downtime. Option B is wrong because manual upgrade via the console can cause downtime if not done during a maintenance window. Option C is wrong because modifying the DB instance to a new version immediately can cause downtime. Option D is wrong because creating a new instance and migrating requires additional setup and downtime.

Answer

Manually upgrade the DB instance using the AWS Management Console immediately.

Answer

Modify the DB instance to specify the new engine version and apply immediately.

Answer

Create a new DB instance with the new version and migrate the data.

Question 6

A company runs SAP ERP on AWS with a two-tier architecture: application and database on the same EC2 instance. The instance is part of an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of 1 and maximum of 1, so it's effectively a single instance. The operations team wants to implement a patching strategy for the operating system that minimizes downtime. They need to apply security patches quarterly. Which approach should they take?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Automation to create a new AMI, launch a new instance, and update the DNS record.. Option D is correct because using AWS Systems Manager Automation to create an AMI, launch a new instance, and update DNS allows a controlled replacement with minimal downtime. Option A is wrong because in-place patching requires downtime. Option B is wrong because AWS Patch Manager can patch in-place but still requires reboot. Option C is wrong because Auto Scaling with two instances would work but the architecture is single-tier.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to apply patches during a maintenance window.

Answer

Create a second instance in the Auto Scaling group and detach the original.

Answer

Apply patches in-place using yum update and reboot the instance.

Question 7

A financial services company runs a multi-tier application on AWS. The application consists of an Application Load Balancer (ALB), a fleet of EC2 instances for the web tier, and an Amazon RDS for MySQL database for the backend. The operations team uses AWS CloudFormation to manage infrastructure. During a recent deployment, a change to the database security group caused an outage because the web tier lost connectivity to the database. The team wants to prevent similar incidents in the future. They need a solution that allows them to review and approve changes to critical resources before deployment, while still enabling rapid deployment for non-critical changes. The team uses AWS CodePipeline for CI/CD. Which approach should the team implement?

Accepted Answer

Use CloudFormation Change Sets in the pipeline and add a manual approval step for any change that modifies the database security group.. Option B is correct because CloudFormation Change Sets allow you to preview how proposed changes will affect your resources before execution. By integrating a manual approval step in the CodePipeline that triggers specifically when the change set modifies the database security group, the team can review and approve critical changes while allowing non-critical changes to proceed automatically. This directly addresses the requirement to prevent outages from unapproved security group modifications.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to automatically remediate non-compliant changes before they are applied.

Answer

Use AWS Service Catalog to create a portfolio of approved stacks and require all deployments to use the portfolio.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor changes to the security group and trigger a rollback if unauthorized changes are detected.

Question 8

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS in a single region with a multi-AZ setup. The SAP HANA database uses HANA System Replication (HSR) for high availability. The primary HANA instance is in us-east-1a and the secondary is in us-east-1b. The application servers are split across both AZs. Recently, during a maintenance window, the primary HANA instance failed unexpectedly. The secondary automatically took over. However, after the failover, the application servers in us-east-1a are experiencing higher latency when connecting to the database, while application servers in us-east-1b have normal latency. The network team confirms that the inter-AZ latency is within normal limits. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the increased latency?

Accepted Answer

The application servers in us-east-1a are now connecting to the HANA database in us-east-1b, which adds inter-AZ latency.. Option C is correct because after the failover, the secondary HANA instance in us-east-1b became the active database. Application servers in us-east-1a must now connect across AZs to reach the database in us-east-1b, incurring inter-AZ latency. Although the network team confirms normal inter-AZ latency, the additional network hop and physical distance between AZs still introduce higher latency compared to same-AZ connections, which explains the observed increase.

Answer

The secondary HANA instance is using a different instance type with a single Elastic Network Interface (ENI), which limits throughput.

Answer

The placement group that includes the application servers and the database is now split across AZs, reducing performance.

Answer

The EBS volumes attached to the old primary instance are still being replicated to the secondary, causing network congestion.

Question 9

A media company is migrating its on-premises video processing infrastructure to AWS. The current infrastructure uses a custom application that splits video files into segments, transcodes them using FFmpeg, and assembles the final output. The application runs on a single server with 64 vCPUs and 256 GB RAM. The migration plan is to use AWS Batch with EC2 instances for the transcoding jobs. The video files are stored on an on-premises NAS and will be migrated to Amazon S3. The company needs to minimize latency for file access during migration and reduce the time to transfer initial data. The company has a 1 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection. The total data volume is 500 TB. The migration window is 30 days. Which approach should the team use to transfer the initial data to S3 with the lowest latency and within the migration window?

Accepted Answer

Use multiple AWS Snowball Edge devices to transfer the data in parallel, then copy from the devices to S3 using the Snowball client.. Option B is correct because AWS Snowball Edge devices provide a physical, high-bandwidth transfer method that bypasses network constraints entirely. With 500 TB of data and a 1 Gbps Direct Connect link, the theoretical maximum transfer over the network in 30 days is only ~324 TB (1 Gbps * 30 days * 86400 seconds/day / 8 bits per byte), which is insufficient. Multiple Snowball Edge devices in parallel can transfer the full 500 TB within the migration window without saturating the Direct Connect link, and the Snowball client efficiently copies data to S3 after the devices are returned.

Answer

Use AWS DataSync to transfer data over the Direct Connect connection in multiple concurrent tasks.

Answer

Use a single AWS Snowball Edge device and copy data incrementally.

Answer

Use S3 Transfer Acceleration to speed up transfers over the internet.

Question 10

A company is migrating its on-premises web application to AWS. The application consists of a stateless web tier and a stateful database tier running on a single server. The web tier uses session data stored in the local file system. The database tier runs on MySQL. The company wants to minimize changes to the application code during migration. They plan to use Amazon EC2 for the web server and Amazon RDS for MySQL for the database. After migrating the web server to an EC2 instance and the database to RDS, users report that they are being logged out of the application frequently. What is the most likely cause of this issue?

Accepted Answer

The web server's session data is stored locally and is lost when the EC2 instance is replaced or restarted.. The web tier stores session data in the local file system of the EC2 instance. When the instance is replaced or restarted (e.g., due to Auto Scaling, instance failure, or a maintenance event), that local session data is lost. Since the application code was not modified to use a shared session store (like ElastiCache or DynamoDB), users lose their sessions and are logged out. This is the most likely cause because the migration explicitly minimized code changes and did not address the stateless web tier requirement.

Answer

The RDS instance's backup window is causing database connections to drop.

Answer

The application's session timeout setting was reduced during migration.

Answer

The security group for the web server is blocking inbound session cookies.

Question 11

A company runs a multi-tier application on AWS. The application consists of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that distributes traffic to a fleet of EC2 instances running a web server. The web servers write logs to an Amazon EFS file system mounted across all instances. The operations team reports that the web application is experiencing intermittent high latency and timeouts. Monitoring shows that the ALB's target response time is normal, but the application's internal processing time is high. Further investigation reveals that the EFS performance metrics show high 'BurstCreditBalance' and 'PercentIOLimit' during the latency spikes. The EFS file system is configured with 'Bursting' throughput mode. The team needs to resolve the latency issue with minimal cost. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Increase the size of the EFS file system to increase the baseline throughput and burst credits.. Option D is correct because increasing the size of an EFS file system in Bursting mode raises its baseline throughput and burst credit accumulation rate. The high BurstCreditBalance and PercentIOLimit indicate the file system is exhausting its burst credits and hitting its I/O limit, causing throttling and latency. A larger EFS volume provides a higher baseline throughput, reducing reliance on burst credits and smoothing performance without additional cost for Provisioned Throughput.

Answer

Migrate the log files to Amazon S3 and use S3 Transfer Acceleration for writes.

Answer

Switch the EFS throughput mode to Provisioned Throughput to guarantee higher performance.

Answer

Add more EC2 instances to the Auto Scaling group to distribute the I/O load.

Question 12

A company has a production AWS account that contains an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The database is critical and must have automated backups enabled with a retention period of 30 days. The company also requires point-in-time recovery to any second within the retention period. The operations team has configured automated backups with a retention period of 30 days, but they notice that the automated backups are not being taken consistently. The DB instance is in a Multi-AZ deployment and has a storage size of 500 GB. The team checks the backup window and finds that it is set to 02:00-03:00 UTC. The backup window is non-overlapping with the maintenance window. The DB instance is actively used during the backup window with heavy write traffic. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason for the inconsistent automated backups?

Accepted Answer

The heavy write traffic during the backup window causes I/O suspension and backup failures.. The heavy write traffic during the backup window causes I/O suspension, which can lead to backup failures. When an RDS for MySQL DB instance experiences high write activity during a backup, the backup process may be delayed or fail due to I/O suspension, especially if the instance is under heavy load. This is because automated backups require a consistent snapshot, and excessive write I/O can prevent the snapshot from completing within the backup window.

Answer

The storage size of 500 GB exceeds the maximum backup size limit.

Answer

The Multi-AZ deployment does not support automated backups.

Answer

The backup window overlaps with the maintenance window.

Question 13

An SAP system running on AWS uses a Multi-AZ deployment with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributing traffic across two application servers in different Availability Zones. The ALB health checks are configured to check the /sap/public/health endpoint on each instance. Recently, the operations team noticed that one of the instances is being marked as unhealthy intermittently, causing a slight increase in response times. The instance's CPU utilization is under 40%, memory is sufficient, and the health endpoint returns a 200 OK status when tested manually. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The health check interval is too frequent or the timeout is too short.. Option C is correct because the health check request may be timing out due to a short timeout setting. The health endpoint works manually but may take longer under load, causing intermittent failures. Option A is wrong because the health check URL is correct. Option B is wrong because health checks are sent from the ALB, not the internet. Option D is wrong because security group allows inbound from ALB.

Answer

The health check endpoint is configured with the wrong path.

Answer

The security group for the instances does not allow inbound traffic from the ALB.

Answer

The health check requests are blocked by a network ACL.

Question 14

An SAP system on AWS uses a Multi-AZ deployment for the database layer with synchronous replication. The application servers are in the same region but different Availability Zones. During a recent failure of the primary database instance, the automatic failover to the standby instance took longer than expected, exceeding the RTO of 5 minutes. Upon investigation, the team finds that the standby instance was not fully synchronized at the time of failure. What could be the cause?

Accepted Answer

The network latency between the Availability Zones is high.. Option C is correct because if the network latency between Availability Zones is high, synchronous replication can cause the primary to wait for acknowledgment, slowing down transactions and causing the standby to lag. Option A is wrong because Multi-AZ does not have a single point of failure for network. Option B is wrong because EBS volume performance affects both instances. Option D is wrong because security groups do not cause replication lag.

Answer

The EBS volumes on the standby instance have lower IOPS than the primary.

Answer

The Multi-AZ configuration uses a single network interface.

Answer

The security groups on the standby instance block replication traffic.

Question 15

A retail company runs its SAP ERP system on AWS. The system includes an SAP HANA database on an r5.8xlarge instance with 4TB of storage using a single EBS io1 volume with 16000 provisioned IOPS. The application experiences periodic slowdowns during end-of-month financial closing, which typically lasts for 2 hours. The CloudWatch metrics show that during the slowdown, the EBS volume's Average Queue Length peaks at 20, and the instance's EBS Bandwidth is at 3500 Mbps (the maximum for r5.8xlarge is 4750 Mbps). The database team confirms that HANA is not CPU-bound during these periods. The SAP team wants a cost-effective solution to eliminate the performance bottleneck. Which solution should be recommended?

Accepted Answer

Move to an r5n.24xlarge instance and use multiple io1 volumes in a RAID 0 stripe to increase throughput.. Option B is correct because the bottleneck is EBS bandwidth, not IOPS. The r5.8xlarge instance has a maximum EBS bandwidth of 4750 Mbps, and during the slowdown the volume is already using 3500 Mbps, leaving limited headroom. By moving to an r5n.24xlarge instance, which offers significantly higher EBS bandwidth (up to 19,000 Mbps), and using multiple io1 volumes in a RAID 0 stripe, you can distribute the I/O load and increase both throughput and IOPS, eliminating the queue length issue cost-effectively without over-provisioning a single volume.

Answer

Use an Amazon FSx for Lustre file system as the HANA data volume for higher throughput.

Answer

Increase the provisioned IOPS on the io1 volume to 32000 IOPS to reduce queue length.

Answer

Switch to a gp3 volume with 16000 IOPS and 1000 MB/s throughput to reduce cost.

Question 16

An SAP system uses a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to distribute traffic to SAP application servers. The application servers are in private subnets. The operations team notices that the health checks are failing for one of the application servers. The health check is configured to use TCP on port 3200. The application server's security group allows inbound traffic on port 3200 from the NLB's subnet CIDR. The network ACL allows inbound and outbound traffic on ephemeral ports. What is the most likely cause of the health check failure?

Accepted Answer

The security group does not allow inbound traffic from the NLB's private IP addresses.. Option C is correct because the NLB health checks originate from its own IP addresses, not from the client IPs. The security group must allow traffic from the NLB's private IP addresses. Option A is wrong because the application may be listening correctly. Option B is wrong because NACLs are properly configured. Option D is wrong because the NLB communicates with targets using their private IPs.

Answer

The network ACL is blocking the health check traffic.

Answer

The SAP application is not listening on port 3200.

Answer

The NLB is configured to use the instance's public IP address.

Question 17

A company runs SAP on AWS and uses a Multi-AZ RDS for SAP ASE database. The operations team receives an alert that the database instance failed over automatically. After the failover, the SAP application servers are unable to connect to the database. The team checks the RDS console and sees that the DB instance status is 'available' and the endpoint is the same as before. The security groups and network ACLs have not changed. What is the MOST likely reason for the connectivity issue?

Accepted Answer

The application servers have cached the old database IP address and need to flush DNS.. Option A is correct because after a failover, the DNS record for the RDS endpoint is updated to point to the new primary, but the application may still be using the old IP due to DNS caching. Option B is wrong because the endpoint remains the same. Option C is wrong because Multi-AZ failover updates the DNS record. Option D is wrong because the failover does not change the security group.

Answer

The RDS endpoint changed after the failover.

Answer

The DNS record for the RDS endpoint did not update after the failover.

Answer

The security group for the database instance no longer allows traffic from the application servers.

Question 18

A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The operations team reports that the application becomes unresponsive for about 30 seconds every hour at the same time. The team checks the ALB access logs and notices that during the outage, the ALB returns HTTP 504 errors. The RDS monitoring shows a spike in CPU usage and active connections during the same period. The application team confirms there are no scheduled jobs during that time. What should the team do to diagnose the root cause?

Accepted Answer

Check the RDS Enhanced Monitoring metrics for the database instance to identify resource bottlenecks such as high memory pressure or disk I/O.. Option D is correct because the symptoms—hourly 30-second unresponsiveness, HTTP 504 errors from the ALB, and a correlated spike in RDS CPU and active connections—point to a database-side bottleneck. RDS Enhanced Monitoring provides OS-level metrics (memory, disk I/O, CPU) that can reveal resource contention or throttling events (e.g., swap usage, IOPS exhaustion) not visible in standard CloudWatch metrics, enabling precise root cause identification.

Answer

Review the security group rules for the database to ensure the application can connect.

Answer

Review the ALB target group health checks and ensure the EC2 instances are passing the health check.

Answer

Increase the EC2 instance size to handle more concurrent connections.

Question 19

A company runs its SAP S/4HANA production workload on AWS using an 8xlarge instance with 2,000 GB of gp3 storage for /usr/sap and 6,000 GB of io2 Block Express with 64,000 IOPS for /hana/data and /hana/log. The system experiences intermittent performance degradation during peak hours, particularly for batch jobs that heavily write to the database. The SAP team reports that the database response time spikes from under 5 milliseconds to over 200 milliseconds during these periods. The AWS account has a default EBS IOPS limit of 80,000 per region. The current io2 volume is attached as a single volume. Which combination of actions would resolve the performance issue?

Accepted Answer

Split the /hana/data volume into multiple io2 volumes, configure them as a RAID 0 stripe, and attach each to a separate EBS-optimized connection. Increase total provisioned IOPS to 80,000 distributed across volumes.. Option B is correct because splitting the /hana/data volume into multiple io2 volumes and configuring them as a RAID 0 stripe distributes I/O across multiple EBS-optimized connections, effectively increasing the available throughput and IOPS beyond the limits of a single volume attachment. This approach also allows the total provisioned IOPS to reach 80,000, which is the regional default limit, while each individual volume stays within its own IOPS ceiling, thus resolving the database response time spikes during peak batch write operations.

Answer

Replace the io2 volumes with larger gp3 volumes and increase the volume size to 8,000 GB to benefit from gp3 baseline performance.

Answer

Migrate to a larger instance type with higher EBS-optimized bandwidth and increase the volume IOPS to 80,000.

Answer

Increase the provisioned IOPS on the existing io2 volume to 80,000 IOPS to stay within the default limit.

Question 20

A company is migrating an SAP BusinessObjects system to AWS. The system includes a Central Management Server (CMS) and several processing servers. The CMS uses a SQL Server database. The company wants to use a managed database service on AWS to reduce operational overhead. The database size is 100 GB and is expected to grow 10% annually. The company requires automatic failover to a secondary Availability Zone with minimal downtime. Which AWS database service should the company use for the CMS database?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ deployment. Option C is correct because Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ provides automatic failover to a standby in another AZ. Option A is wrong because Amazon Aurora is not compatible with SQL Server. Option B is wrong because SQL Server on EC2 is not managed. Option D is wrong because Amazon DynamoDB is NoSQL and not compatible with SQL Server.

Answer

Amazon EC2 with SQL Server installed

Answer

Amazon Aurora SQL Server

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB