PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company runs SAP HANA on AWS and needs to ensure that the database can survive a single Availability Zone failure without manual intervention. The SAP HANA system is currently deployed on a single EC2 instance. Which solution meets this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse instance-level recovery (Auto Scaling) with database-level replication, assuming that launching a new EC2 instance automatically restores the SAP HANA database, when in fact HANA data is ephemeral unless explicitly replicated or backed up.
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 with a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone and enable automatic takeover
SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) with automatic takeover provides synchronous or asynchronous data replication to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). When the primary fails, the secondary automatically becomes the new primary without manual intervention, ensuring database survival during a single AZ failure. This is the only option that meets the requirement for automatic failover across AZs.
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 an Auto Scaling group to launch a new SAP HANA instance if the current instance fails
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling does not handle database state and is not suitable for stateful databases like SAP HANA.
- ✓
Configure SAP HANA System Replication with a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone and enable automatic takeover
Why this is correct
System Replication with automatic takeover ensures failover without manual intervention.
- ✗
Deploy the SAP HANA instance in a placement group within a single Availability Zone
Why it's wrong here
Placement groups improve performance but do not provide AZ failure resilience.
- ✗
Take daily EBS snapshots and copy them to another AWS Region
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots are not for automatic failover and have a high RTO.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PAS-C01 question from scratch — 1,616 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.