PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is running SAP S/4HANA on AWS. The application team reports that batch jobs are failing intermittently with database connection timeouts. The SAP system uses a single Availability Zone deployment. Which design change should the architect recommend to improve database availability?
⚠ Common exam trap
AWS often tests the misconception that scaling up or adding storage redundancy (like Multi-Attach) solves database availability issues, but the key is that SAP HANA requires database-level replication (HSR) to handle AZ failures, not just infrastructure-level changes.
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
✓
Configure SAP HANA System Replication across two Availability Zones
SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) across two Availability Zones provides synchronous or asynchronous data replication at the database level, ensuring that if the primary HANA instance fails, the secondary can take over with minimal downtime. This directly addresses the intermittent database connection timeouts by eliminating the single point of failure in a single-AZ deployment, as the application can failover to the replica 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.
- ✗
Use Amazon EBS Multi-Attach to attach the same volume to multiple EC2 instances
Why it's wrong here
EBS Multi-Attach is not supported for SAP HANA and does not provide database failover.
- ✗
Implement an Amazon RDS for SAP HANA read replica
Why it's wrong here
RDS for SAP HANA does not support read replicas; also read replicas do not provide failover.
- ✓
Configure SAP HANA System Replication across two Availability Zones
Why this is correct
SAP HANA System Replication with automatic failover ensures high availability across AZs.
- ✗
Scale up the SAP HANA instance to a larger instance type
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up increases resources but does not provide high availability.
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