PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company has an SAP HANA database running on an EC2 instance with multiple EBS volumes striped using LVM. The database is experiencing high latency during peak hours. Monitoring shows that the EBS volumes have a high Average Queue Length (avgqueue) and are frequently hitting the IOPS limit. The volumes are gp2 with 3000 IOPS each. The operations team wants to improve performance without increasing storage size. What should they do?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Change the volume type to gp3 and increase the IOPS and throughput.
Gp3 volumes provide a higher baseline IOPS (3000) than gp2 at the same storage size, and allow increasing IOPS and throughput independently without increasing storage. This addresses the high latency and IOPS limit issue without requiring additional volume size. Option A is wrong because io2 Block Express is designed for very high performance and may be excessive for this scenario, also likely increasing cost. Option B is wrong because instance store is ephemeral and not suitable for persistent database storage. Option D is wrong because adding more gp2 volumes would increase the total IOPS (since each gp2 volume has 3000 IOPS) and could help if the bottleneck is at the volume level, but gp3 provides a more cost-effective and simpler solution without adding more volumes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Change the volume type to io2 Block Express with higher IOPS.
Why it's wrong here
Changing to io2 Block Express may provide higher performance but is typically more expensive and may be overkill for this use case; gp3 is a better immediate step.
- ✗
Migrate the database to an instance store-backed instance.
Why it's wrong here
Instance store provides high performance but is ephemeral, so it is not suitable for a persistent database like SAP HANA.
- ✓
Change the volume type to gp3 and increase the IOPS and throughput.
Why this is correct
This is correct because gp3 offers a baseline of 3000 IOPS regardless of volume size, and allows separate increases in IOPS and throughput without increasing storage, directly addressing the latency and IOPS limit issue.
- ✗
Add more gp2 volumes to the LVM stripe set.
Why it's wrong here
Adding more gp2 volumes to the LVM stripe set increases total IOPS but does not address the per-volume IOPS limit as efficiently as switching to gp3, and may increase complexity and cost.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PAS-C01 exam.