Passing the AWS SAP on AWS — Specialty Certification in 2025
The AWS SAP on AWS — Specialty exam is a challenging AWS Certification. This certification validates expertise in designing, implementing, migrating, and operating SAP workloads on AWS.
AWS SAP Migrations Diagram
We will discuss details further but this image encapsulates some of the key tools and approaches for AWS SAP Migrations.
I believe that anyone reviewing AWS SAP Migrations should print out the image above as a quick reference when getting familiar with this topic.
As stated in the AWS Certified: SAP on AWS — Specialty Exam Guide, the exam has the following content domains and weightings:
- Domain 1: Design of SAP Workloads on AWS (30%)
- Domain 2: Implementation of SAP Workloads on AWS (24%)
- Domain 3: Migration of SAP Workloads to AWS (26%)
- Domain 4: Operation and Maintenance of SAP Workloads on AWS (20%)
Study Approach
More details on this certification can be obtained at the AWS Website. A detailed overview can be found at the AWS Certified: SAP on AWS — Specialty Exam Guide. For most certifications, I get a video course and then practice some questions to get ready. I used Riyaz Sayyad’s Udemy Course AWS Certified SAP on AWS Specialty — Hand On Guide. It was pretty thorough in presenting the basic material.
Practice Tests:
Preparing for the exam involves validating your knowledge and learning where you need to improve. This does take some time but it is key in passing the exam itself. I used the following question sets:
- Whizlabs AWS Certified SAP on AWS — Specialty exam (PAS-C01) (2 x 65 Questions)
- ExamTopics Amazon AWS Certified SAP on AWS — Specialty PAS-C01 Exam: (64 Free, 136 in Total)
- AWS SkillBuilder Exam Prep Official Practice Question Set: (20 Questions)
- AWS Sample Questions (10 questions)
General approach
- Be consistent and try to practice daily to keep the momentum of preparing
- View wrong answers as an opportunity to learn more(Don’t feel bad about wrong answers, everyone gets some wrong answers and certainly when you are starting to study.
Thoughts on some of the exam sets that were used
WhizLabs offers a good set of questions to prepare. There are 2 x 65 question sets to cover the material at a reasonable price. There is also a randomized question set that you can select but I just used the 2 65 question sets until I was getting very high marks to indicate that I was ready.
There are some good questions provided by ExamTopics , if you do not pay for a subscriptions you don’t get to see all of the questions and you have to deal with the annoying CAPTCHA prompts.
Remember that you should review the “Most Voted” answer rather than the initial answer ExamTopics presents. There are some discussion points that reviewers make but generally, I go with what the most voted answer is.
As of the writing of this article, there are 136 questions for this certification and only 64 for the free tier. I find these questions to be pretty good and did help out on the exam for sure.
SAP Terms:
SAP Basis — technical foundation that enables SAP applications to function
SAP Business One — A single, affordable ERP solution to manage your entire small business
SAP cluster solution — uses the overlay IP address assigned to ensure that the HA cluster is still accessible during the failover scenarios
SAP ECC — an on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system
SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) — a set of data provisioning adapters to provide access to and interaction with SAP ECC data and metadata.
SAP Hana — (High-performance Analytic Appliance) is a multi-model database that stores data in its memory instead of keeping it on a disk.
SAP Hana Cockpit — can be used to reduce cost of backups
SAP Hana System Replication — a mechanism ensuring the high availability of your SAP HANA system
- Replication Modes
- ASYNC — commits the transaction after sending the log without waiting for a response
- SYNC — primary system waits with committing the transaction until it gets a reply that the log is persisted in the secondary system
- SYNCMEM — primary system commits the transaction after it gets a reply that the log was received by the secondary system and stored in memory
SAP Hana Studio — an Eclipse-based development and administration tool for working with SAP HANA
SAP HANA dynamic tiering — an optional add-on to the SAP HANA database for managing less frequently accessed warm data
SAP HANA classical Migration — is heterogeneous system copy using classical migration tools such as SWPM, R3load, Migration Monitor etc.
SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) — ensuring the high availability of your SAP HANA system
Instance Secure Store in the File System(SSFS) — protect the root keys used for all data-at-rest encryption services and the internal application encryption service
SAP NetWeaver — an open integration and application platform and facilitates the implementation of the Enterprise Services Architecture
SAP Network Communication(SNC) — to enforce TLS / encryption of data in transit
Primary Application Server (PAS)
Additional Application Server (AAS)
SAP Process Orchestration (SAP PO) — supports custom process applications and integration scenarios
SAP Note 1656099 — information regarding SAP-supported operating systems on AWS
SAProuter — acts as an intermediate station (proxy) in a network connection between SAP systems, or between SAP systems and external networks
- access from SAP-provided IP Addresses should be allowed with TCP port 3299
SAP Secure Network Communication (SNC) — enforce Transport Layer Security
SAP Software Provisioning Manager(SWPM) — offers the execution of many system provisioning tasks and covers a broad range of platforms and products, both on the ABAP and the Java technology
SWPM heterogeneous copy — involves a change in database or operating system
SAP Hana System Replication — a mechanism for ensuring the high availability of your SAP HANA system
SWPM homogeneous copy — no change in database or operating system
SAP Software Provisioning Manager— can copy the source system to a target system, when Db2 is used as a database
SAP Software Update Manager (SUM) Database Migration Option (DMO) — AWS customers can use the SAP SUM DMO tool to migrate their database to SAP HANA on AWS.
SUM with System Move — enables you to migrate your SAP system from your on-premises environment to AWS by using a DMO tool and a special export and import process
SAP Secure Network Communication (SNC) -
SAP Solution Manager —a n application lifecycle management (ALM) platform used to implement, maintain, and integrate SAP systems
SAP Support Backbone — the central infrastructure located at SAP to provide technical support to our customers
SAP Transport Directory — Change and Transport System (CTS) uses the transport directory to store transport data.
SAP Web Dispatcher — lies between the Internet and your SAP system. It is the entry point for HTTP(s) requests into your system, which consists of one or more SAP NetWeaver application servers
Oracle:
Oracle Database replication — process of copying and maintaining database objects in multiple databases that make up a distributed database system
Oracle Data Guard — provides a comprehensive set of services that create, maintain, manage, and monitor one or more standby databases to enable production Oracle databases to survive disasters and data corruptions
Concepts:
AWS Backint agent — an SAP-certified backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances
UploadChannelSize parameter (Backint) — Specifies the number of files that can be uploaded in parallel to the S3 bucket during the backups.
AWS Data Provider for SAP — is a tool that collects performance-related data from AWS services. It makes this data available to SAP applications to help monitor and improve the performance of business transactions. A prerequisite for SAP Support.
AWS Launch Wizard for SAP — offers a guided way of sizing, configuring, and deploying AWS resources for third party applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server Always On and HANA based SAP systems, without the need to manually identify and provision individual AWS resources
Overlay IP Address — is a special case of networking in AWS, which is of critical importance in SAP environments that require High Availability setup
AWS Quick Starts — are automated reference deployments built by Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions architects and AWS Partners
Source/destination check for database EC2 instances — Each EC2 instance performs source/destination checks by default. This means that the instance must be the source or destination of any traffic it sends or receives
AWS Systems Manager Distributor — helps you package and publish software to AWS Systems Manager managed nodes
Tips/Key points:
Only Oracle Linux(AIX) supports SAP Oracle based database
SLES,RHEL, Windows OS for SAP application servers
Oracle database and application servers with oracle clients must run on Oracle Enterprise Linux(OEL)
Hana Backint agent is a database native option rather than AWS Backint agent which is not
SAP HANA system replication in with the preload option for data replication between primary and secondary provides lowest possible RTO
Backup:
Cloud Endure — removes administrative overhead of multiple solutions for data replication
Choosing best instance size: Early Watch alert reports & SAPS rating & source system specs on Note 1656099
CloudEndure does not require a CloudEndure server in central EC2 instance
Distractors:
Some general rules to follow and work in most cases
- Any mention of “every 10 minutes” or some time interval is not usually a correct choice
- Generally, any option with EBS(Elastic Block Storage) involved in it
- Any mention of FTP
- Any mention of non AWS/SAP technologies (native Oracle tools, XTTS conversions, R3 load, native SQL Server database backup)
- Any mention of regular snapshots or odd sounding processes or approaches
- Any mention of “backup and restore” or “system export/import” when
“least possible downtime” is desired
Some additional scenarios
There are some scenarios that you might want to look at that I did not really see in my trainings.
- Use of asymmetric or symmetric customer keys with KMS
- Whether a 3rd overlay address is required for ERS in some SAP implementations
- Use of NetApp OnTap AWS and FSx in some AWS SAP implementations
- If a database has a certain amount of required IOPS during its onpremise behaviour, will a Provisioned IOPS EBS be the right choice?
- If you want to restore a production SAP implementation in your QA environment, will you ensure that the QA Backint version is the same as the production version to do this?
Conclusion
You will learn a lot about how to implement SAP on AWS with this certification. Start with a video course to get you warmed up, then you can practice until you feel you are ready to take the actual exam.
With the right preparation, you should be able to make the right moves on exam day to achieve this certification. An analogy can be drawn to a hockey player scoring a nice goal!
Best of Luck!
