PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company is running a critical SAP application on AWS. The operations team receives a notification that the SAP HANA database is running low on memory. Which AWS service should be used to automatically increase memory capacity without downtime?
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 EC2 Auto Scaling
Mazon EC2 Auto Scaling (Option B). For SAP HANA on AWS, increasing memory capacity without downtime is achieved through HANA scale-out, which adds additional nodes to the HANA cluster. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can automatically launch new EC2 instances configured as HANA worker nodes, thereby increasing the total available memory. This approach allows the database to accommodate higher memory demand without restarting the existing instance. Option A (ElastiCache) provides a separate caching layer but does not increase HANA's own memory. Option C (DynamoDB) and Option D (Lambda) are irrelevant for this purpose.
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 ElastiCache
Why it's wrong here
Amazon ElastiCache is an in-memory caching service, not a means to increase the memory capacity of SAP HANA itself. It caches frequently accessed data externally, but does not expand the database's memory pool.
- ✓
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Why this is correct
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can automatically launch additional EC2 instances configured as HANA worker nodes in a scale-out cluster, increasing total memory capacity without downtime. This is the correct approach for scaling memory.
- ✗
Amazon DynamoDB
Why it's wrong here
Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service and does not provide memory expansion for SAP HANA.
- ✗
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service and cannot be used to increase database memory capacity.
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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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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.