PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
An SAP system is running on EC2 with a single Availability Zone. The company needs to increase availability for the SAP application layer. Which is the most cost-effective and reliable approach?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently assume that simply adding a second instance in the same AZ (Option A) or using a multi-AZ database (Option C) is sufficient for application-layer high availability, but they overlook that the application tier itself must be distributed across multiple AZs to survive an AZ outage.
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
✓
Use an Auto Scaling group with EC2 instances in two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer.
It distributes the SAP application layer across multiple EC2 instances in two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer, providing both high availability and fault tolerance. The Auto Scaling group ensures that the desired number of instances are maintained even if an instance or an entire AZ fails, while the ALB performs health checks and routes traffic only to healthy instances. This approach is cost-effective as it avoids over-provisioning and only scales based on demand, and it is reliable because it eliminates a single point of failure at the application tier.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy a second EC2 instance in the same AZ and configure a Route 53 weighted routing policy.
Why it's wrong here
Same AZ does not protect against AZ failure; weighted routing is not automatic failover.
- ✓
Use an Auto Scaling group with EC2 instances in two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer.
Why this is correct
Auto Scaling with multiple AZs provides cost-effective high availability and load distribution.
- ✗
Use a multi-AZ RDS database and keep the application on a single EC2 instance.
Why it's wrong here
Database is HA but application layer remains a single point of failure.
- ✗
Use an EC2 instance in a different region and use Route 53 latency-based routing.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-region adds latency and cost; not cost-effective for application layer.
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