PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
An SAP application is experiencing high latency when writing to an Amazon EBS volume. The volume is a gp2 type attached to an m5.4xlarge instance. Which change would improve write performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume increasing gp2 volume size (Option A) will linearly improve performance, but they overlook that gp2's IOPS scaling is capped at 16,000 IOPS and burst credits are finite, whereas io2 provides predictable, provisioned performance.
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
✓
Change the volume type to io2 and provision sufficient IOPS.
The gp2 volume's baseline performance of 3 IOPS per GiB (max 16,000 IOPS) is insufficient for the SAP application's write-intensive workload, causing high latency. Changing to io2 with provisioned IOPS ensures consistent, high-performance writes by decoupling IOPS from volume size, directly addressing the latency issue.
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 size of the gp2 volume to 1 TB.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing size does increase baseline IOPS, but may not achieve required latency.
- ✗
Change the volume type to st1.
Why it's wrong here
st1 is optimal for sequential throughput, not low latency.
- ✗
Enable EBS optimization on the EC2 instance.
Why it's wrong here
m5 instances are already EBS-optimized by default.
- ✓
Change the volume type to io2 and provision sufficient IOPS.
Why this is correct
io2 volumes provide consistent low-latency performance.
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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.