PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is designing an SAP HANA workload on AWS. They need to ensure high availability for the SAP HANA database with automatic failover in case of an instance failure. Which AWS service should they use to achieve this?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse DNS-level failover (Route 53) with true database-level high availability, or assume a managed service like RDS exists for SAP HANA, when in fact SAP HANA on AWS requires self-managed clustering with Pacemaker and EBS Multi-Attach.
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
✓
Pacemaker cluster on Amazon EC2 with EBS multi-attach
Pacemaker is a high-availability cluster resource manager that, when combined with Amazon EC2 and EBS Multi-Attach, enables automatic failover for SAP HANA. EBS Multi-Attach allows the same EBS volume to be attached to multiple EC2 instances in the same Availability Zone, which is required for SAP HANA's shared-storage-based scale-up or scale-out HA configurations. This setup supports the SAP HANA system replication or storage replication failover mechanism, ensuring automatic recovery upon instance failure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon RDS for SAP HANA
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS does not support SAP HANA.
- ✓
Pacemaker cluster on Amazon EC2 with EBS multi-attach
Why this is correct
Correct. Pacemaker coordinates failover using shared storage via EBS multi-attach.
- ✗
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Beanstalk is for web applications, not SAP HANA.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53 health checks with DNS failover
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 does not provide automatic database failover; it only redirects traffic.
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 |
Go deeper
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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.