This PAS-C01 practice question tests your understanding of design of sap workloads on aws. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
An SAP system on AWS is running on an r5.16xlarge instance. The system is experiencing network throughput bottlenecks. Which step should be taken to improve network performance?
Move the instance to a placement group
Why wrong: Placement group reduces latency but not throughput.
Attach an Elastic Fabric Adapter
Why wrong: EFA is for tightly coupled HPC, not SAP.
Enable Enhanced Networking and install the ENA driver
ENA provides higher bandwidth and lower latency.
Change the instance type to c5.18xlarge
Why wrong: Compute optimized may not improve network throughput.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
Enable Enhanced Networking and install the ENA driver
Option C is correct because enabling Enhanced Networking and installing the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver is the standard method to achieve higher packet-per-second (PPS) performance, lower latency, and increased network bandwidth on supported instance types like r5.16xlarge. Without the ENA driver, the instance uses the older Xen network driver, which cannot utilize the full 25 Gbps network bandwidth available to r5 instances, leading to throughput bottlenecks.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
Move the instance to a placement group
Why it's wrong here
Placement group reduces latency but not throughput.
Attach an Elastic Fabric Adapter
Why it's wrong here
EFA is for tightly coupled HPC, not SAP.
Enable Enhanced Networking and install the ENA driver
Why this is correct
ENA provides higher bandwidth and lower latency.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Change the instance type to c5.18xlarge
Why it's wrong here
Compute optimized may not improve network throughput.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates assume changing to a larger or different instance type (like c5.18xlarge) will automatically increase network bandwidth, when in fact the root cause is the missing ENA driver, and the r5.16xlarge already supports the same 25 Gbps bandwidth once Enhanced Networking is enabled.
Detailed technical explanation
Enhanced Networking with ENA uses a hardware virtual function (VF) interface that bypasses the hypervisor for data path processing, achieving up to 25 Gbps on r5 instances. The ENA driver implements the Elastic Network Adapter specification, which supports multiple Tx/Rx queues and scatter-gather I/O, enabling higher PPS (up to 1 million PPS per vCPU). A common oversight is that even if the instance type supports high bandwidth, the OS must have the ENA driver loaded and the `ena` module present; you can verify with `ethtool -i eth0` to see the driver in use.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
A healthcare organisation deploys an application with a public-facing web tier and a private database tier. The database subnet has no public IP and only accepts connections from the web tier's security group. Questions like this test whether you can design cloud network isolation using VNets/VPCs, subnets, and security group rules.
What to study next
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FAQ
Design of SAP Workloads on AWS — This question tests Design of SAP Workloads on AWS — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Enable Enhanced Networking and install the ENA driver — Option C is correct because enabling Enhanced Networking and installing the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver is the standard method to achieve higher packet-per-second (PPS) performance, lower latency, and increased network bandwidth on supported instance types like r5.16xlarge. Without the ENA driver, the instance uses the older Xen network driver, which cannot utilize the full 25 Gbps network bandwidth available to r5 instances, leading to throughput bottlenecks.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 24, 2026
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.
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