This actually should have been one of those beginning of the New Year blogs or even better published in Dec following reInvent. The topic summarizes all the oodles of goodness AWS announced that are highly relevant for any SAP customer. But for various reasons – it got delayed until now. But it’s chock-full of really good information that will definitely enrich your Tuesday, or even the whole year! So read on, 🙂

First of all, this is actually a guest blog, written by our close colleagues at AWS. Let me introduce David Rocha – Sr. Partner Solutions Architect and Soumya Das – Partner Solutions Architect. David’s specialty is SUSE and everything Linux. Soumya’s specialty is everything SAP.

So without further ado, here’s their blog:

New AWS features and services for SAP on AWS customers

In the words of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, ‘there is no compression algorithm for experience’.

Since 2010, customers have benefited from both AWS and SUSE providing products and services that give enterprise customers fast, flexible access to the cloud for a variety of workloads. SUSE first published SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2010 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (SLES for SAP) on AWS in 2016.

The workloads have evolved in the last 16 years and includes mission critical applications like SAP. SAP applications represent the financial system of record and business process backbone for most of the world’s enterprises. SAP states that 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system and 91% of the Forbes Global 2000 are SAP customers. AWS and SUSE supported applications include SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC), SAP HANA Database, SAP S/4HANA and all its associated platforms like SAP S/4 Central Finance, SAP MDG(Master Data Governance), or SAP CAR(Customer Activity Repository).

AWS is the choice for 5000+ SAP customers and hundreds of partners. Whether you want to lift and shift your existing SAP workloads to reduce costs, re-factor your SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, or innovate and modernize with AWS services, you can count on AWS’s unmatched experience, infrastructure, and platform breadth to get more value out of your SAP investments.

Let’s dive into some of the new announcements for 2021 – 2022:

New Instances

A number of new instances were released for SAP workloads including recent additions that were announced during re:Invent 2021 [1]:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud R6i instances and Amazon EC2 M6i instances are powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Ice Lake). The newer instance families provide up to 15% better compute price performance, up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU, up to 50GBps networking speed and up to 40 GBPS of bandwidth to the Amazon EBS compared to the previous generation instances. [2]
• AWS recently announced the Amazon EC2 M6a are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (code named Milan) which is the latest AMD processor certified to run SAP workloads. [3]
• Amazon EC2 X2idn and X2iedn instances are SAP-Certified and are a great fit for workloads such as small-to large-scale traditional and in-memory databases,and analytics.  Amazon EC2 X2idn and X2iedn instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency up to 3.5 GHz and deliver up to 50% higher compute price performance than comparable Amazon EC2 X1 instances. Additionally, these instances provide 45% more SAPS than comparable Amazon EC2 X1 instances. [4]
• Four new EC2 High Memory instances were launched in May 2021. The new EC2 High Memory instances with 6TB, 9TB, and 12TB of memory (u-6tb1.56xlarge, u-6tb1.112xlarge, u-9tb1.112xlarge, and u-12tb1.112xlarge) are available for usage with On-Demand (OD) and Savings Plan purchase options. This launch gives customers greater flexibility for instance usage and procurement.with up to 12TB of memory are now available with On-Demand and Savings Plan purchase options. [5]

New Tooling

AWS Launch Wizard now supports SAP S/4HANA 2021, SAP BW/4HANA 2021, and SAP HANA SPS06 deployments running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP 15 SP3 (SLES for SAP). AWS Launch Wizard offers customers and partners a way of sizing, configuring, and deploying AWS resources for SAP S/4HANA or SAP BW/4HANA. This launch makes it easy for customers to deploy and scale these applications on the latest SUSE Linux versions in accordance with AWS, SAP, and SUSE best practices. [6]

AWS announced CloudWatch Application Insights for SAP HANA installed on SLES and SLES for SAP 15 or later. This allows CloudWatch Application Insights to analyze metric patterns using historical data to detect anomalies, and continuously track errors and exceptions from SAP HANA, operating systems, and infrastructure logs. This service creates dashboards that show the observations and problem severity information to help you prioritize your actions. For common problems in SAP HANA database, it provides additional insights to determine root cause and steps for resolution. It also sets up dynamic alarms on monitored metrics which are automatically updated based on anomalies detected on historical data. [7]

New version of Amazon Inspector automates vulnerability management at the Amazon EC2 instance level. For SAP workloads, Amazon Inspector supports operating systems like SLES and SLES for SAP. It delivers real-time findings by using AWS Systems Manager agent (SSM). [8]

Other Cool Stuff

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) native replication can now be leveraged to automatically maintain copies of your Amazon EFS file systems for business continuity. It helps you to meet compliance requirements as part of your disaster recovery strategy. You can set this up in minutes for new or existing Amazon EFS file systems, with replication either within a single AWS region or between two AWS regions. [9]

SAP Lens for AWS Well Architected Framework can help customers make design decisions when architecting SAP on AWS. The SAP Lens is a collection of design principles and best practices and by utilizing it customers and partners can evaluate their SAP workloads against this best practices and principles. That makes sure that they are designed to align with the recommendations provided by SAP and AWS. In essence, SAP Lens is organized in 5 AWS Well-Architected pillars – Security, Reliability, Performance efficiency, cost optimization and Operational Excellence. [10]

AWS Training & Certification will launch an AWS Certified SAP on AWS Specialty (PAS-C01) in April 2022. This is a new AWS specialty certification that validates advanced technical skills and experience to design, implement, migrate, and operate SAP workloads optimally on AWS. [11]

Conclusion:

AWS and SUSE continue to provide products and services that give enterprise customers fast, flexible access to AWS for SAP applications. The announcements listed in the blog are not an all encompassing list. We recommend that you visit the links for each of the announcement to learn more about the features and benefits. Additionally, AWS has a blog [12] category that focuses on SAP applications that you can follow to learn more about recent launches, as well as blogs that cover new design recommendations and service integrations.

We’re looking forward to 2022 and the new product and services that will continue to focus on your success!