PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company runs SAP HANA on EC2 with EBS io1 volumes. The administrator notices that the disk queue depth is consistently high during peak hours, causing increased latency. The volume is 2 TB with 5000 provisioned IOPS. The instance is an r5.4xlarge with EBS bandwidth of 4750 Mbps. The database workload is write-intensive. The administrator wants to reduce latency without increasing costs significantly. Which action should the administrator take?
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
✓
Increase the provisioned IOPS to 10,000
Increasing the provisioned IOPS to 10,000 directly addresses the high disk queue depth by allowing more I/O operations to be processed concurrently, thereby reducing latency. Option B is incorrect because EBS Multi-Attach is used to attach a volume to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously, but it does not improve queue depth or latency for a single instance write-intensive workload. Option C is incorrect because changing to gp3 with the same 5000 IOPS does not provide any performance improvement; gp3 has a baseline of 3000 IOPS and relies on burst credits, which is not suitable for sustained high write demands. Option D is incorrect because upgrading to an r5.8xlarge increases network and EBS bandwidth but does not increase the provisioned IOPS, so it does not resolve the queue depth issue and adds unnecessary cost.
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 provisioned IOPS to 10,000
Why this is correct
Higher IOPS reduces queue depth and latency.
- ✗
Enable EBS Multi-Attach and use multiple instances to share the volume
Why it's wrong here
Multi-Attach does not reduce queue depth for a single instance.
- ✗
Change the volume type to gp3 with 5000 IOPS
Why it's wrong here
gp3 may have similar performance but does not guarantee improvement; also, gp3 baseline is 3000 IOPS, so 5000 IOPS would cost extra.
- ✗
Upgrade the EC2 instance to an r5.8xlarge
Why it's wrong here
Increases cost and EBS bandwidth may not be the bottleneck.
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