PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is migrating its SAP ERP system to AWS. The system requires high availability for the SAP central services (ASCS) and must support automatic failover. Which AWS architecture should the company use to meet these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates assume a Network Load Balancer (Option A) provides automatic failover for stateful SAP services, but NLB operates at Layer 4 and cannot handle the cluster state and shared storage requirements of SAP ASCS.
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
✓
Deploy ASCS on an EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling group with a lifecycle hook that triggers a Lambda function to reattach the ASCS cluster resources.
It describes a pattern for achieving automatic failover of SAP ASCS using an Auto Scaling group with a lifecycle hook. When the ASCS instance fails, the Auto Scaling group launches a new instance, and the lifecycle hook triggers a Lambda function that reattaches the cluster resources (e.g., EIP, EBS volumes, or shared file systems) to the new instance, enabling the SAP ENSA2 or ENSA1 cluster to resume operations without manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure a Network Load Balancer in front of two ASCS instances in different Availability Zones.
Why it's wrong here
NLB distributes traffic but does not handle ASCS failover; ASCS requires a shared file system and cluster software.
- ✗
Use Amazon RDS Multi-AZ to host the SAP central services.
Why it's wrong here
RDS Multi-AZ is for databases, not for SAP ASCS.
- ✓
Deploy ASCS on an EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling group with a lifecycle hook that triggers a Lambda function to reattach the ASCS cluster resources.
Why this is correct
This provides automated failover and high availability for ASCS.
- ✗
Run ASCS on a single EC2 instance in a single Availability Zone with an Elastic IP address.
Why it's wrong here
Single instance offers no high availability.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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