PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company runs SAP HANA on AWS with a multi-AZ deployment using HANA System Replication (HSR). The primary site is in us-east-1a and the secondary in us-east-1b. Each site has an ASCS and PAS. The HANA database uses a virtual IP address managed by a Route 53 health check with a failover routing policy. During a recent AZ failure in us-east-1a, the automatic failover to the secondary site took over 15 minutes. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 5 minutes. Analysis shows that the Route 53 health check failed but the failover did not trigger quickly because the DNS TTL was set to 300 seconds. What changes should be made to meet the RTO?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often think increasing TTL improves stability (Option A) or that an ALB can replace a virtual IP for HANA HSR (Option B), but the core issue is DNS propagation delay, and only reducing TTL with a failover routing policy directly addresses the RTO requirement.
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
✓
Reduce the DNS TTL to 60 seconds and use a weighted routing policy with health checks.
Reducing the DNS TTL to 60 seconds ensures that DNS resolvers cache the failover record for a shorter duration, allowing the Route 53 failover routing policy to propagate the new IP address more quickly after a health check failure. Combined with a weighted routing policy and health checks, this enables failover within the 5-minute RTO by minimizing DNS propagation delay, which was the bottleneck at 300 seconds.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the DNS TTL to 600 seconds to ensure stability.
Why it's wrong here
Higher TTL increases failover time, not decreases.
- ✗
Replace Route 53 with an Application Load Balancer for the virtual IP.
Why it's wrong here
ALB is for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, not for HANA database connections.
- ✓
Reduce the DNS TTL to 60 seconds and use a weighted routing policy with health checks.
Why this is correct
Lower TTL speeds up DNS propagation; weighted routing allows immediate failover.
- ✗
Remove the health check and use a simple routing policy with a low TTL.
Why it's wrong here
Without health checks, failover cannot be automated.
Visual reference
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This PAS-C01 question is part of Courseiva's 1,616-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam 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.