PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
A company has deployed its SAP S/4HANA system on AWS in a single Availability Zone. The system consists of a primary application server (PAS), additional application servers (AAS), and a HANA database server, all running on EC2 instances. The company is experiencing occasional performance degradation during peak hours. The CloudWatch metrics show that the database server's CPU utilization spikes to 90% during these periods, while the application servers' CPU remains below 50%. The storage is configured with two EBS io1 volumes (each 1 TB, 10,000 IOPS) for HANA data and one io1 volume (500 GB, 5,000 IOPS) for log. The network throughput is not saturated. The company wants to resolve the performance issue without increasing costs significantly. Which course of action should the company take?
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
✓
Implement SAP HANA System Replication with a secondary node in the same AZ to offload read operations.
Implementing SAP HANA System Replication with a secondary node in the same Availability Zone allows read-only queries to be offloaded to the secondary node, reducing CPU load on the primary database server. This directly addresses the CPU spike during peak hours without significantly increasing costs. Option B is wrong because the performance issue is CPU-bound, not I/O-bound; increasing IOPS would add cost without resolving the CPU bottleneck. Option C is wrong because switching from io1 to gp3 may reduce storage costs but does not improve CPU performance. Option D is wrong because upgrading to a larger instance is expensive and may not be necessary if HSR can distribute the load effectively.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Implement SAP HANA System Replication with a secondary node in the same AZ to offload read operations.
Why this is correct
HSR allows read workloads to be redirected to the secondary, reducing CPU on primary.
- ✗
Increase the Provisioned IOPS on the data volumes to 20,000 each.
Why it's wrong here
The bottleneck is CPU, not IOPS; increasing IOPS will not help and increases cost.
- ✗
Switch the EBS volumes from io1 to gp3 to reduce latency.
Why it's wrong here
gp3 may have higher latency than io1; the issue is CPU, not storage latency.
- ✗
Upgrade the database instance to a larger type, such as r5.12xlarge.
Why it's wrong here
This increases costs significantly; HSR is more cost-effective.
Visual reference
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
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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.