CHS reflects on four years of SAP DevOps on AWS: benefits, lessons learned, and best practices

Co-authored by CHS SAP team members Haritha Malempati, Naresh Kumar Aedudodla, and Mukesh Kakani

AWS customer CHS has learned a lot about operating in the cloud since beginning their SAP on AWS journey in 2020. Today we’ll reflect on their 4+ years of production operation in the cloud and explore how they delivered efficiency gains and near-zero downtime to the 750 cooperatives and 75,000 producers that depend on CHS every day.

Beginning the CHS SAP modernization journey

CHS is a US-based global agribusiness cooperative with roots tracing back nearly 100 years. They provide a diversified set of agronomy, grain, and energy products and services to farmers and customers across rural America and beyond. CHS began its SAP on AWS experience in 2020 and published some initial gains around innovation and cost in 2021. This post expands on their learnings from 4 years of running SAP in production on AWS.

Like many large enterprises, CHS operated corporate data centers for over 60 years. Now CHS runs SAP natively on AWS, the cloud with the broadest and deepest compute offerings, including a wide selection of SAP-certified instances optimized for a variety of SAP use cases. Modernizing to SAP natively on AWS provided CHS an opportunity to evolve their SAP Basis team into a self-sufficient SAP Platform team. They leveraged their migration from on-premises to build extensive DevOps skills. To accelerate learning and deployment, CHS enlisted help from AWS Professional Services, embedding alongside their teams experienced builders with best practices from AWS’s 16+ years of running SAP in the cloud for over 5,000 customers.

The why and the how of SAP modernization

Customers cite several reasons for choosing to migrate SAP to AWS, including:

• Increased access to innovation
• Abilities to automate operational activities which are typically manual on-premises
• Reduced effort and cost to deploy and run SAP environments
• General advantages of a partner with more experience running SAP than any other cloud provider

CHS developed a comprehensive approach to their migration, encompassing SAP infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and automated administration. They incorporated build automation, start/stop automation, automated OS patching, and application server auto scaling. Here are some of the key elements of their “SAP as code” approach:

1. Embracing automation to streamline the deployment, configuration, and management of SAP environments
2. Adopting modern practices and tools — such as continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), automation, and IaC — to define SAP infrastructure in code
3. Versioning SAP infrastructure code and storing it centrally to facilitate collaboration, drive consistency, provide traceability, and enable quick rollbacks when needed
4. Meticulous planning and implementation to reduce deployment time and minimize the risk of errors

Well-architected results

The CHS team’s efforts transformed the operational agility and performance of critical business systems, providing efficiency gains and near-zero downtime to the 750 cooperatives and 75,000 producers that depend on CHS every day. They learned new skills, architected more resilient systems, accelerated innovation, enhanced security, optimized costs, and more.

The pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework provide a helpful construct to contextualize these gains. AWS introduced Well-Architected 2015 to help customers improve their cloud architectures by codifying best practices learned from working with thousands of customers. In 2021, AWS published an SAP-specific Lens to the framework. The most recent update to Well-Architected was in 2024. The six pillars are:

For the CHS learnings below, we’ve grouped improvements into each pillar by primary benefit, but you’ll notice that a benefit in one pillar often created benefits in other pillars. For example, automating changes (Operational Excellence) led to higher Reliability and increased Performance Efficiency. Streamlining resource allocation (Performance Efficiency) led to more granular Security and improved Cost Optimization. And gains in any of the first five pillars typically benefit Sustainability: maximizing utilization accomplishes more with less, optimizing cost reduces energy use, and cloud resilience strategies use fewer resources to maintain business continuity.

Operational Excellence: modernizing SAP system refreshes and OS upgrades to provide continuous improvement with reduced business impact

The SAP System Refresh is a maintenance activity that many SAP customers want to modernize. It maintains system integrity and data consistency for the SAP Quality Assurance (QA) system, and it typically requires several days of downtime that disrupts multiple projects. For CHS, technical downtime was 3 days, and business stakeholders would often delay system refreshes to avoid that downtime, causing scheduling churn and disrupting critical project testing cycles. As part of their migration to AWS, the CHS SAP Platform team developed an innovative and cloud-native approach to system refreshes that reduced technical downtime 86% from 3 days to 10 hours or less. Their approach leverages ephemeral infrastructure, creating temporary clones of the QA applications and databases to run the time-consuming post-processing steps while the production QA system continues serving the business without interruption. Business stakeholders rarely delay system refresh events now that the business impact is 86% smaller.

Another maintenance task that often got de-prioritized in the on-premises environment was operating system (OS) upgrades. The business only allowed them on weekends because of the lengthy downtime and multiple teams required. Outage day required up to 8 hours of coordination and handoffs between the infrastructure and SAP Basis teams. Delaying OS upgrades delayed access to new innovations and security fixes. Now, with “SAP as code,” OS upgrades happen faster, during normal business hours, with no downtime, and are managed by a single team. To make that possible, the CHS SAP Platform team architected highly available systems that can be upgraded in-place with little or no disruption to the business. All the servers — individual applications, Central Services (SCS), Enqueue Replication Servers (ERS), and HANA databases — are upgraded sequentially, one by one.

The improvements go beyond system refreshes and OS upgrades. Automating SAP Operations using AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for SAP means system patches, SAP kernel updates, and HANA patch updates can also be brought into compliance with monthly patch cycle policies.

Security: “SAP as code” to enhance data integrity protection and manage access more granularly

At AWS, security is our top priority. For CHS, the “SAP as code” approach helps to standardize data encryption both at rest and in transit. Their SAP implementation follows many principles of the Well-Architected security pillar, including the industry-standard AES-256 and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption built into AWS services, monitoring to detect security changes over time, and narrowly scoped access controls that are specific to each application. By versioning and controlling SAP application security templates, CHS can verifiably confirm adherence to organizational security standards. Automation significantly reduces their manual effort, delivering up-to-date security with near-zero downtime and minimal disruption to daily operations. CHS uses these security efficiency gains to focus more on strategic initiatives that drive business growth.

Reliability: Distributed systems and advanced cloud features to eliminate unplanned downtime

CHS recognized early in their journey that AWS innovations in file systems could help maintain business continuity. Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides serverless, elastic, set-and-forget file storage as a fully managed service. Amazon FSx makes it similarly easy to launch, run, and scale a variety of commercial and open-source file systems. FSx was the first storage service to run certain SAP-certified storage types in the cloud, bringing popular and robust data management features to the agility, scalability, and resiliency of AWS.

CHS identified several valuable features that were unique to FSx: storage clustering, data replication, and failover mechanisms that maintain high availability of data even during maintenance activities and hardware failures. These powerful features gave the SAP Platform team the confidence to host critical filesystem data in AWS for a few interesting SAP use cases. For example, FSx helps ensure appropriate encryption and permissions of SAP application files. It also performs replication to their disaster recovery (DR) system, improving data resilience.

To date, these efforts have eliminated unplanned outages. And while FSx was the right fit for those use cases, EFS delivered a different benefit via its Infrequent Access (IA) storage class. CHS saves thousands of dollars by moving files that haven’t been accessed for 30 days to EFS IA.

Performance Efficiency: “SAP as code” to streamline build, deploy, and change processes

Speed and agility both improved for CHS after the migration. Before the cloud, a typical SAP server build request would take roughly two weeks. Now the SAP Platform team can have new SAP servers operational in about one day. In the case of one third-party application, IaC not only helped deploy the required servers, but also established a reusable template for its narrowly-scoped, application-specific instances. With reimagined provisioning processes like these, CHS business teams that rely on SAP to serve their customers can adapt to changing requirements faster than ever before.

In addition to delivering new resources more efficiently, IaC helps CHS standardize and streamline change management and decommissioning unused resources. In the on-premises environment, it would take five days of ticketing processes and approval queues to accommodate CPU or memory upgrade requests. Today in the cloud, they implement similar change requests to server types or Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume properties in as little as 30 minutes. The continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines that come with “SAP as code” make changes transparent and traceable, and they often decommission old resources automatically. These features help CHS scale their SAP infrastructure during critical load tests and simplify the cleanup afterward.

Cost Optimization: Auto scaling SAP applications to adapt to changing business needs without overspending

Most of the benefits we’ve discussed also help CHS optimize cost. One of the most impactful values of the cloud is the ability to scale up and down in minutes, paying only for the resources you need to serve your current customer demand. For most applications, standard Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling metrics and features work well. However, for SAP applications to auto scale effectively, customers must consider SAP-specific nuances like work process consumption and background job completion. CHS uses the SAP Application Auto Scaling solution from AWS Professional Services, which provides a turnkey solution as native IaC, to implement SAP-specific auto scaling best practices. As a result, their SAP applications provision resources as needed for incoming requests and scale down during periods of low demand to minimize cost, all without manual intervention. CHS continues to learn and modernize, adding these savings to the savings they shared in 2021.

Conclusion

The CHS “SAP as code” approach has transformed the agility, reliability, scalability, security, and efficiency of their SAP workloads. Embracing automation has accelerated their progress and built a foundation for future innovation and growth.

Shane VanderVoort, who was Director of SAP Engineering when this journey began, currently oversees SAP at CHS as Senior Director of Cloud and Enterprise Technology Operations:

“This framework has revolutionized our ability to serve our customers. It drastically reduced downtime and minimized service interruptions. Our ability to deploy system changes quickly, with minimal business impact, has been a game-changer, ensuring that the cooperatives and producers we support can operate smoothly and without disruption. We’ve improved our responsiveness and overall customer experience as a result.”

VanderVoort continues:

“On the employee side, the integration of automation and cutting-edge technology has not only improved operational efficiency but also elevated staff morale. By streamlining repetitive tasks, we’ve empowered our teams to focus on higher-value work, fostering innovation and career growth. This shift has made CHS a more dynamic and rewarding place to work, positioning us for continued success in the future.”

Innovations like those we’ve highlighted today help CHS continue to be a top-3 Minnesota Fortune 500 company.
In VanderVoort’s words:

“CHS is a great place to work because it combines cutting-edge technology with a supportive, collaborative culture. Employees are empowered to innovate, grow their skills, and make a real impact, all while working in an environment that values both professional development and teamwork.”

Learn More

Explore SAP on AWS
Discover developer tools at AWS for CI/CD, IaC, SDKs, IDEs, and more
Read how AWS Well-Architected helps organizations improve their cloud usage
Browse solutions for agriculture at AWS

About the Authors

Haritha Malempati (CHS)
SAP CloudOps Engineer
Haritha leads efforts at CHS to build and maintain SAP infrastructure through DevOps tools. With over 15 years as an SAP BASIS engineer, she blends SAP skills with DevOps expertise to automate instance builds, updates, and maintenance. Her current focus is on automation and cost optimization. She plays a key role in assisting the SAP platform team to achieve highly stable, cost optimized systems.

Naresh Kumar Aedudodla (CHS)
Sr. Systems Expert
Naresh currently serves on the SAP Platform team, where he leads infrastructure design, automation, installation, and operational support for SAP systems. His 18 years of deep expertise in SAP BASIS span end-to-end SAP system builds, with a focus on high availability, disaster recovery, and performance optimization. Naresh is a collaborative and technical leader, and a trusted expert for complex SAP cloud transformation projects.

Mukesh Kakani (CHS)
Sr. Manager, Product Delivery SAP Platform
Mukesh is a hands-on IT leader with over 21 years of experience specializing in the SAP BASIS platform. Currently, Mukesh manages the SAP Platform team at CHS, where he has played a key role in architecting and executing large-scale SAP implementations on AWS, with a focus on automation, downtime reduction, security, and cost optimization.

Tom Lauducci (AWS)
Sr. Solutions Architect
Tom has supported CHS’s cloud transformation for the past 4 years. In his 13 years at Amazon, he also designed the workstations and robotics you see on a Fulfillment Center tour, as well as physical data security systems for AWS data centers. Tom is an event speaker, patent holder, blog author, and technical advisor. He maintains 6 AWS certifications and has over 20 years of experience in R&D, engineering, manufacturing, and sales across several industries.

Bidwan Baruah (AWS)
Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect, SAP on AWS
Bidwan specializes in guiding enterprises through the complexities of SAP on cloud migrations and digital transformation. In his 5 years at AWS, he has helped CHS and many other enterprises migrate and modernize their SAP workloads. Bidwan is a distinguished speaker and author who regularly shares his expertise through speaking engagements and technical publications.