PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is designing an SAP S/4HANA deployment on AWS with high availability. They want to use a shared file system for the SAP transport directory. Which AWS service should they use for this shared file system?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Amazon EBS Multi-Attach (which is limited to a single AZ and a small number of instances) with a true multi-AZ shared file system, or they mistakenly think Amazon S3 can be used as a shared file system via a mount point (e.g., s3fs), which lacks the POSIX compliance and locking required for SAP transport directories.
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
✓
Amazon EFS
Amazon EFS is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed, POSIX-compliant, NFS-based shared file system that can be mounted concurrently by multiple EC2 instances across different Availability Zones, which is exactly what an SAP transport directory requires. The SAP transport directory (e.g., /usr/sap/trans) must be accessible from all SAP application servers in the high-availability cluster, and EFS supports the necessary file locking and consistency semantics for SAP's transport management system (TMS).
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 EFS
Why this is correct
EFS provides a scalable NFS file system that can be shared across multiple AZs.
- ✗
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
Why it's wrong here
FSx for Windows uses SMB, which is not typical for SAP transport directories on Linux.
- ✗
Amazon EBS with multi-attach enabled
Why it's wrong here
EBS multi-attach is limited to io1/io2 and only works within a single AZ, not across AZs.
- ✗
Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
Amazon S3 is an object store, not a POSIX-compliant file system, so it cannot support the low-latency, concurrent file locking and NFS/SMB protocol requirements of an SAP transport directory shared across multiple application servers. It is tempting because S3 offers durable, scalable storage for backups or static content, and would be correct for archiving SAP transport logs or storing non-shared, read-heavy data where object-level access suffices.
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