Modernize your SAP eco-system with SAP BTP and AWS services

Customers have been running SAP workloads on AWS since 2008. SAP and AWS have partnered for 14+ years to jointly innovate for our customers. Our guiding star has been to bring flexibility and agility of the AWS platform to run SAP workloads. SAP has consistently leveraged AWS services over the years to run internal systems and customer offerings like SAP Concur, SAP CX (Customer Experience through SAP Qualtrics), SAP NS2 HANA Secure Cloud, and many more. SAP’s largest deployment of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is on AWS, offering 80+ services to help customers innovate around their ERP core. The SAP BTP portfolio comprises of a variety of services including SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Integration Suite, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, and more, catering to application development and automation, planning, data/analytics, integration and artificial intelligence. SAP on AWS customers have consistently told us that one of their motivations for migrating to cloud is to integrate SAP with AWS services such as storage, data analytics, IoT, Machine Learning and automation capabilities in addition to the cost savings and scalability of AWS infrastructure. Working backwards from these customer needs, AWS and SAP are continuously investing in providing innovations to customers through joint reference architectural guidance as a first step followed by automation. This blog discusses AWS and SAP’s approach to publish joint guidance to customers through reference architectural patterns for an initial set of high-level business use cases. There are also additional references for detailed implementation guidance for each of these architectural patterns.

RISE with SAP on AWS

RISE with SAP is a fully managed solution from SAP for customers running SAP or other ERP workloads on-premises and looking to migrate to SAP S/4HANA on the cloud. AWS and SAP have been working together to help customers accelerate this business transformation through RISE with SAP through a guided transformation journey. RISE with SAP customers on AWS are able to migrate, deploy and innovate rapidly irrespective of where they are currently in their cloud journey. SAP S/4HANA Cloud (offered through RISE with SAP) helps customers align their business processes with the industry standards and this forms the core as it serves as the central repository for critical business processes. SAP BTP in conjunction with AWS provides a simplified architectural approach to embrace a clean core model by providing a framework for application development, integration and analytics as an integrated extension to the ERP core to drive benefits including simplified and accelerated migrations, business process automation & optimization and 360° analytics.

Joint Reference Architecture approach

AWS and SAP have been partnering to devise reference architecture patterns for areas such as business process integration, extension, data management, and analytics scenarios. These patterns are driven by 3 foundational pillars that include Platform, Data-to-Value and Application that aligns with SAP BTP’s foundational services. Each of these pillars caters to innovation and the use of complementing SAP BTP and AWS services to drive efficiency of customer’s business operations. The diagram (Figure 1 – Overview of SAP BTP on AWS Joint Reference Architecture) presents the overarching architectural representation of combining the strengths of AWS and SAP BTP services to establish the foundational pillars of Platform, Data and Application. The focus of this initial architecture is around high availability, built in resiliency and innovation focusing on automation and reduction of technical debt featuring foundational SAP BTP services like SAP Build Work Zone, SAP Cloud Integration, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, etc., and AWS services like Amazon Route 53, Amazon Sagemaker and Amazon Redshift.

Figure 1 – Overview of SAP BTP on AWS Joint Reference Architecture

Platform Foundation

One of the fundamental requirements of mission critical business applications is business continuity. Modern day business applications not only require business continuity but also enhanced reliability and reduced latency. Customers rely on having an architecture that is resilient to failures through a stringent monitoring framework and a reliable failover strategy. Through highly resilient implementations, customers maintain uninterrupted access to critical applications using the AWS Global Infrastructure. Under the platform foundation pillar, we focus on enabling SAP BTP foundational services such as Build Work Zone and Integration Suite to be highly resilient by leveraging AWS regions in conjunction with Amazon Route 53 service. More context and implementation details on this architectural guidance can be found here

Data to Value

Data is one of the most valuable assets of any business and increasingly customers are adopting multi-source data storage strategies in the cloud while their core business data lies in SAP sources. The Data federation strategy helps customers be efficient as it provides real time access to multi-sourced data by eliminating data duplication and data pipeline. This also helps in reducing the technical debt resulting in an optimized Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). By securely federating and blending various data sources including SAP, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena through SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC), we are empowering customers for efficient planning, curation, machine learning and analytics. One such possibility for the bi-directional data federation using Amazon Athena and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC) is discussed in this blog

With the data assembled in a data warehouse, customers are looking to extract meaningful insights using the power of Machine Learning techniques to forecast future strategic needs of their businesses. Using live SQL connections, SAP FedML can help source data from SAP DWC onto Amazon Sagemaker which will model, train and predict based on the combined data set that natively resides in AWS data stores and SAP. This processed dataset can either be natively consumed within AWS or be passed back to SAP DWC through FedML. Refer to this blog for a detailed architectural guidance

Integration and Application Development

Modern day applications are expected to have a built-in resiliency framework not only at the application layer but also at the foundational infrastructure and data layers as well, thereby creating a distributed resiliency across the board. Customers can build business applications in SAP BTP using SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) that serves as a framework of languages, libraries, and tools to guide developers along a path of proven best practices and a great wealth of out-of-the-box solutions to recurring tasks. These natively built applications within SAP BTP can be made highly available with a combination of AWS services like Amazon Route 53 and Amazon Aurora. Amazon Aurora is a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, providing customers the performance and availability of commercial-grade databases at a lower cost. More context and implementation details on this architectural guidance can be found here

Other integration possibilities of SAP BTP and AWS include building SAP S/4HANA business process extension applications to send/receive notifications leveraging Amazon Simple notification Service (SNS). This integration is particularly useful for businesses that need real time notifications for business process and technical applications audit for faster support response and resolution. Also, CAP applications interacting with IoT sensors periodically, on data receipt, can trigger necessary notifications using Amazon SNS based on established priority levels. This blog covers a real-world use case related to S/4HANA migration scenario when customers create SAP Business partners, where the integration helps to notify duplicates/errors.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have discussed a high-level strategy of SAP and AWS in providing architecture patterns for modernizing your SAP eco-system with SAP BTP and AWS services. Each of the patterns are described along with a brief solution overview accompanied by real world use cases. Detailed implementation of these architectural patterns is described in respective reference blogs from SAP. This blog serves as a beginning for a series of detailed joint reference architectural guidance planned by AWS and SAP. Stay tuned for more.

Check out the following sessions the joint teams presented in 2022 with respect to the joint reference architectures for SAP workloads on AWS.

Here are some further references that you may find useful.

You can find out more about SAP on AWS, Amazon Route53, Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Aurora from the AWS product documentation.

If you require additional expert guidance, contact your AWS account team to engage a local SAP specialist solution architect or the AWS Professional Services SAP specialty practice.

Join the SAP on AWS Discussion

In addition to your customer account team and AWS Support channels, we have recently launched re:Post – A Reimagined Q&A Experience for the AWS Community. Our SAP on AWS Solution Architecture team regularly monitor the SAP on AWS topic for discussion and questions that could be answered to assist our customers and partners. If your question is not support-related, consider joining the discussion over at re:Post and adding to the community knowledge base. To learn more about thousands of active customers run SAP on AWS, visit the SAP on AWS page.

Credits

The AWS and SAP partnership on Joint Reference Architectures are the result of deep collaboration and contribution from SAP and AWS organizations. We would like to thank the following members for their expertise, support and guidance.

Team AWS: Sabari Radhakrishnan, Sunny Patwari, Rajesh Chigurupati, Yuva Athur, Ganesh Suryanarayanan, Krishnakumar Ramadoss, Spencer Martenson, Adam Hill, Scott Rigney, Soulat Khan and Erik Kamman.

Team SAP: Madankumar Pichamuthu, Sangeetha Krishnamoorthy, Karishma Kapur, Weikun Liu, Haridas Nair, Sivakumar N and Anirban Majumdar

AWS for SAP