PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company is deploying SAP S/4HANA on AWS and needs to ensure high availability for the central services (ASCS and ERS). The architecture uses two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones with a shared file system using Amazon EFS for /sapmnt. The SAP system is configured with an enqueue replication server. The operations team needs to automate the failover of the ASCS instance in case of a failure. The team is considering using AWS services for this purpose. Which approach should the team use?
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
✓
Use Amazon Route 53 with health checks and a custom script to update DNS record on failover.
Route 53 health checks can monitor the ASCS instance and a custom script can update DNS records to point to the standby instance on failure, enabling failover across Availability Zones. Option B is incorrect because an Application Load Balancer cannot properly direct traffic to a single active ASCS instance and does not handle the stateful nature of SAP enqueue replication. Option C is incorrect because Auto Scaling is designed for scaling out, not for failover of stateful services like ASCS. Option D is incorrect because EC2 Auto Recovery only recovers the same instance on new hardware if it fails, but it does not failover to a different Availability Zone, which is required for high availability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use Amazon Route 53 with health checks and a custom script to update DNS record on failover.
Why this is correct
DNS-based failover can redirect clients to the secondary ASCS instance.
- ✗
Use an Application Load Balancer with a target group containing both ASCS instances.
Why it's wrong here
ALB is for HTTP traffic, not for SAP-specific protocols.
- ✗
Use an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of 2 instances and a lifecycle hook to handle failover.
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling is designed for stateless applications.
- ✗
Enable EC2 Auto Recovery to automatically recover the ASCS instance on new hardware.
Why it's wrong here
Auto Recovery does not failover to another AZ.
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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.