A company's SAP application has a backend SQL Server database in an on-premises environment. The company wants to migrate its on-premises application…

The question states that performance data shows both the SAP application and its backend database have high memory utilization. AWS provides specific EC2 instance families tailored to different workload characteristics. The Memory Optimized instance family (e.g., R, X series) is engineered to deliver high performance for workloads that process large data sets and are memory-intensive. This includes high-performance databases like SQL Server and enterprise applications like SAP that rely heavily on in-memory data caching for performance. Therefore, using memory-optimized instances for both the application and the database is the most appropriate solution to meet the specified requirements.

A. A compute-optimized instance for the application ignores the stated requirement of high memory utilization for the application tier, making it a suboptimal choice.

B. Storage-optimized instances are designed for workloads requiring high, sequential disk I/O, which does not match the primary requirement of high memory utilization.

D. High-Performance Computing (HPC) instances are for specialized, tightly coupled computational workloads, not for a standard SAP application server, making this choice inappropriate.

1. Amazon EC2 Instance Types

AWS Documentation: Under the "Memory optimized" section

it states

"Memory optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory." Use cases listed include "High-performance relational...databases" and "Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications (e.g. SAP)". This directly supports using this family for both the database and the SAP application.

Source: Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). Amazon EC2 Instance Types. AWS Documentation. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

2. SAP Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework

AWS Whitepaper: In the Performance Efficiency Pillar

section "PERF 2: How do you select the best performing resources?"

the document advises

"For SAP HANA and other in-memory databases

use AWS memory-optimized EC2 instances... For SAP application servers

you can choose from a wide variety of EC2 instance types... For memory-intensive workloads

use memory-optimized instances." This confirms that for workloads explicitly identified as having high memory utilization

memory-optimized instances are the correct choice for both tiers.

Source: AWS Well-Architected Framework. (2023

December). SAP Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework

p. 16. Retrieved from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sap-lens/sap-lens.pdf

3. SAP on AWS Technical Documentation

AWS Documentation: The overview for deploying SAP solutions on AWS consistently highlights the use of EC2 instances certified for SAP. These certifications predominantly feature memory-optimized instances (like the X family) for databases and either general-purpose or memory-optimized instances for application servers

depending on the specific memory requirements of the workload.

Source: Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). SAP on AWS Technical Documentation. AWS Documentation. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/sap/technical-documentation/