PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
A company is running SAP NetWeaver on AWS and wants to implement high availability for the ASCS instance. Which AWS service can be used to monitor and automatically restart the ASCS instance if it fails?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse EC2 Auto Recovery with EC2 Auto Scaling, assuming both can restart a failed instance, but Auto Scaling replaces instances rather than recovering them in-place, which breaks the persistent IP and state required for SAP ASCS high availability.
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 CloudWatch with EC2 Auto Recovery
Amazon CloudWatch with EC2 Auto Recovery is the correct choice because it monitors the health of an EC2 instance at the hypervisor level and can automatically recover a failed instance by restarting it on a new host. For SAP NetWeaver ASCS instances, which require persistent state and are typically tied to a single instance, Auto Recovery ensures the instance is restored with the same private IP, Elastic IP, and instance metadata, maintaining the SAP cluster quorum 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.
- ✗
EC2 Auto Scaling group
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling is for scaling, not recovery of a single instance.
- ✗
AWS Lambda with a scheduled function
Why it's wrong here
A scheduled Lambda function runs on a fixed cron interval, not in response to a real-time process failure, so it cannot detect and restart an ASCS instance immediately after a crash. This option is tempting because Lambda is commonly used for automated recovery tasks, and a scheduled check could work for non-critical services where a delay of several minutes is acceptable. However, SAP ASCS requires sub-minute failover detection, which only a cluster-aware service like Amazon EC2 Auto Recovery or a Pacemaker-based solution can provide.
- ✗
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Why it's wrong here
ELB distributes traffic, does not restart instances.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch with EC2 Auto Recovery
Why this is correct
CloudWatch can detect instance failure and automatically recover the instance.
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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.