PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
A company is running SAP on AWS and wants to ensure high availability for the SAP Central Services (ASCS) instance. They have two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones within a single AWS Region. Which AWS service should be used to automatically fail over the ASCS instance if the primary instance fails?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates assume a load balancer (ALB) is needed for high availability, but SAP ASCS requires a single active endpoint and cannot use load balancing, making Route 53's DNS failover the correct choice.
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 Route 53
Amazon Route 53 can be configured with a health check that monitors the primary ASCS instance. When the health check fails, Route 53 automatically updates DNS records to point to the secondary instance in the other Availability Zone, enabling failover routing. This provides a DNS-level failover mechanism that is suitable for SAP Central Services, which requires a stable IP address or hostname for client connections.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Application Load Balancer (ALB)
Why it's wrong here
ALB is for HTTP/HTTPS traffic; ASCS uses proprietary protocols.
- ✗
AWS Auto Scaling
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling is for scaling groups, not automatic failover of a single instance.
- ✗
AWS CloudFormation
Why it's wrong here
CloudFormation does not provide automatic failover.
- ✓
Amazon Route 53
Why this is correct
Route 53 health checks and failover routing can direct traffic to the healthy 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.