Amazon Aurora Database Now Certified for SAP Hybris Commerce

Bill Timm is a partner solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We are happy to announce the certification of the Amazon Aurora database service for SAP Hybris Commerce on AWS.

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL with the security, availability, and reliability of a commercial database at one tenth the cost.

Benefits of Amazon Aurora

• Fully managed – Amazon Aurora is a fully managed database service. When you run your SAP Hybris Commerce system on Amazon Aurora, you no longer need to worry about database management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, monitoring, or backups. Amazon Aurora automatically and continuously monitors and backs up your database to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), enabling granular point-in-time recovery.
• Highly available and durable – When you run your SAP Hybris Commerce system on Amazon Aurora, you can take advantage of Amazon Aurora’s high availability features. Amazon Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability. Recovery from physical storage failures is transparent, and instance failover typically requires less than 30 seconds. Amazon Aurora’s storage is fault-tolerant and self-healing. Six copies of your data are replicated across three Availability Zones and continuously backed up to Amazon S3.
• Highly scalable – You can scale your Amazon Aurora database from an instance with 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of memory up to an instance with 32 vCPUs and 244 GiB of memory. You can also add up to 15 low-latency read replicas across three Availability Zones to further scale read capacity. Amazon Aurora automatically grows storage as needed, from 10 GiB up to 64 TiB.
• High performance – Amazon Aurora provides five times the throughput of standard MySQL or twice the throughput of standard PostgreSQL running on the same hardware. This consistent performance is on par with commercial databases, at one-tenth the cost. On the largest Amazon Aurora instance, you can achieve up to 500,000 reads and 100,000 writes per second. You can further scale read operations using Read Replicas that have very low latency.
• Highly secure – Amazon Aurora provides multiple levels of security for your database. These include network isolation using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), encryption at rest using keys you create and control through AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and encryption of data in transit using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). On an encrypted Amazon Aurora instance, data in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are the automated backups, snapshots, and replicas in the same cluster.

The certification of the Amazon Aurora database extends the existing benefits of AWS for SAP Hybris Commerce. These benefits include:

• Speed – With AWS you can provision all the required infrastructure for a complete, production-ready SAP Hybris Commerce environment in hours versus weeks or months.
• Scalability – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. Since you can access and manage all AWS services through web service APIs, your SAP Hybris Commerce environment can automatically scale itself up and down depending on your needs.
• Increased availability – On AWS, multiple Availability Zones offer you the ability to operate your SAP Hybris Commerce environment in a more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable architecture than would be possible from a single data center.
• Reduced cost – Without required minimum commitments or long-term contracts you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Our economies of scale translate into lower pay-as-you-go prices for our customers.
• Improved customer experience – You can use the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, and streaming content, using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so your customers are never delayed by high latency.
• Reduced administration – Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of EC2 instances.

SAP Hybris Commerce architecture on AWS

Here’s an architectural diagram of a reference SAP Hybris Commerce environment on AWS.

I’d like to highlight a few key architectural points:

• All tiers of the SAP Hybris Commerce stack are deployed in two Availability Zones, providing a higher level of availability than would be possible from a single data center.
• The SAP Hybris Commerce application tier uses Auto Scaling to monitor the health of application servers and to dynamically scale application servers based on customer traffic.
• The Amazon Aurora database is replicated to a second Availability Zone. If the master database system fails, Amazon Aurora uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Multi-AZ technology to automate failover to the Aurora Replica in the second Availability Zone.
• The Amazon CloudFront global content delivery network service provides secure data delivery to customers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
• Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve fault tolerance in your applications, and seamlessly provides the required amount of load balancing capacity needed to route application traffic.

Customers who are running SAP Hybris Commerce on AWS

Here are case studies of just a few of the many customers who are benefiting from running their SAP Hybris Commerce environments on the AWS Cloud.

• Rent-A-Center (RAC) has undergone a digital transformation during the past few years. As part of that transformation, the company wanted to give its customers the ability to rent items online. To support the new site, RAC decided to use SAP Hybris as its e-commerce platform. After evaluating its options, RAC chose the AWS Cloud for its SAP Hybris environment. The AWS Cloud provides RAC elasticity to support spikes in user traffic, higher availability using Amazon RDS, and the ability to meet its PCI-compliance requirements. Read the full story.
• Travis Perkins plc is a leading United Kingdom builders’ merchant and home-improvement retailer made up of 21 businesses, including Wickes, Tile Giant, and Benchmarx. By migrating their SAP Hybris Commerce environment to the AWS Cloud, they have experienced increased performance, reduced time to provision infrastructure, and reduced cost compared to their on-premises infrastructure. Read the full story.
• GE Oil & Gas has migrated hundreds of applications to the cloud, including SAP Hybris Commerce, as part of a major digital transformation. The GE Oil & Gas cloud migration project has helped the General Electric division achieve a 52 percent decrease in IT costs, greater speed to market, and the agility to compete even better in an industry experiencing immense market challenges. Watch the video.
• DoHome operates as a retail and wholesale store, carrying a wide variety of construction materials, home improvement and home decoration products across Thailand. The company had first deployed their SAP Hybris Commerce system on AWS, enjoying a secured and scalable environment and server runtime of 24/7 before deciding to move their SAP S/4HANA system to AWS. Utilizing services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon VPC, and AWS best practices has helped reduce DoHome’s go-to-market time and improved availability to better serve their customers. Watch the video.

Partner services for SAP Hybris Commerce on AWS

The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes experienced AWS / SAP Hybris Commerce professional services firms that can help you design, architect, build, migrate, and manage your SAP Hybris Commerce environment on AWS. If you are interested in engaging an APN SAP Hybris Commerce partner, contact us.