PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is designing a new SAP environment on AWS. The SAP application servers communicate with the database over the network. The architect wants to minimize latency and maximize throughput. Which placement strategy should the architect use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to assume spreading resources across multiple Availability Zones improves availability, but for SAP workloads requiring minimal latency, a single-AZ cluster placement group is the correct performance optimization, even though it sacrifices AZ-level fault tolerance.
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
✓
Place all servers in a single Availability Zone and use a cluster placement group.
A cluster placement group is the correct choice because it provides the lowest possible latency and highest throughput by ensuring that all SAP application and database servers are placed in close physical proximity within a single Availability Zone. This placement minimizes network hops and leverages non-blocking, high-bandwidth networking, which is critical for SAP's latency-sensitive communication between application and database layers.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Place all servers in a single Availability Zone and use a cluster placement group.
Why this is correct
Cluster placement group provides low latency and high throughput.
- ✗
Place the application servers in one Availability Zone and the database in a different Availability Zone.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-AZ traffic adds latency compared to same AZ.
- ✗
Place the application servers in one VPC and the database in a different VPC connected via VPC peering.
Why it's wrong here
VPC peering adds slight latency; same VPC is better.
- ✗
Place the application servers in one AWS Region and the database in another Region.
Why it's wrong here
Inter-Region network latency, typically exceeding 50–100 milliseconds, directly contradicts the requirement to minimise latency for SAP application-to-database communication, which demands sub-millisecond response times. This option is tempting because cross-Region replication is a valid disaster-recovery strategy for SAP, where the database in a secondary Region provides failover capability without affecting normal production latency.
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