PAS-C01 Pilot Light Practice Question
A company is planning to migrate its SAP landscape to AWS. The SAP systems include a production system, a QA system, and a development system. All systems use the same SAP S/4HANA version. Which strategy is MOST cost-effective for the DR (disaster recovery) setup?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume that cross-Region replication with reserved instances is cost-effective because of the discounts, but they forget that reserved instances represent a long-term financial commitment. For DR workloads that are not continuously active, a pilot light approach that avoids paying for idle compute is actually cheaper.
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 a pilot light strategy with AWS DMS ongoing replication.
For SAP systems where all environments use the same S/4HANA version, the most cost-effective DR approach is a pilot light strategy using AWS DMS ongoing replication. This minimizes costs by replicating only the data (e.g., via DMS) and keeping only essential infrastructure running (e.g., a small standby database) while leaving additional compute resources (application servers, etc.) off until failover. In contrast, cross-Region replication with reserved instances (Option B) incurs significant ongoing costs because reserved instances must be paid for upfront or over time even when not running, and the DR systems would need to be sized for peak capacity, leading to waste. Warm standby (Option A) and active-active (Option D) are more expensive due to the need for continuously running infrastructure or load balancing across regions. Therefore, pilot light with DMS is the most cost-effective for this scenario.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Set up warm standby in a second Region with a standby application server and database.
Why it's wrong here
Warm standby requires running a scaled-down version of the production environment in another region, incurring costs for compute, storage, and license fees for the standby systems, making it more expensive than pilot light.
- ✗
Use cross-Region replication with AWS reserved instances for the DR systems.
Why it's wrong here
Reserved instances require a commitment (1 or 3 years) and incur costs even when the DR systems are not in use. For a DR environment that may only be activated during tests or actual disasters, this is less cost-effective than a pilot light approach where most resources are started only on demand.
- ✓
Use a pilot light strategy with AWS DMS ongoing replication.
Why this is correct
Correct. Pilot light with AWS DMS ongoing replication uses minimal resources (e.g., a small database instance) to keep data synchronized, while application servers and other components are not running. Only during a failover are additional resources provisioned, leading to the lowest possible cost for DR.
- ✗
Deploy active-active SAP systems in two AWS Regions with Elastic Load Balancing.
Why it's wrong here
Active-active deployments in two regions require full production capacity in both regions, along with load balancing and data replication, resulting in substantially higher costs than pilot light.
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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.