PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is running SAP HANA on AWS. The HANA database is deployed on an r5.8xlarge instance. The company notices high CPU utilization on the instance during peak loads. The SAP team confirms that the HANA workload requires more CPU capacity. What is the most cost-effective way to increase CPU capacity without changing the instance family?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse SAP HANA's ability to scale out with the simpler and more cost-effective vertical scaling option, assuming that adding more instances is always the answer for increased CPU demand, when in fact resizing within the same family is the recommended approach for single-node workloads.
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
✓
Resize the instance to a larger instance type in the r5 family.
Resizing the instance to a larger type within the r5 family (e.g., r5.12xlarge or r5.16xlarge) directly increases vCPU and memory capacity without changing the instance family, which is the most cost-effective approach for a single-node SAP HANA deployment. This avoids the complexity, licensing costs, and network latency of scale-out configurations while meeting the CPU demand.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Add more EBS volumes with higher IOPS to offload CPU.
Why it's wrong here
Storage does not increase CPU capacity.
- ✗
Launch additional r5.8xlarge instances and configure HANA scale-out.
Why it's wrong here
Scale-out is costlier and complex.
- ✗
Configure Auto Scaling to add instances during peak load.
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling not suitable for HANA database.
- ✓
Resize the instance to a larger instance type in the r5 family.
Why this is correct
Larger instance type provides more CPU cores.
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