SAP on AWS: 6 Cloud Native Services to Go Beyond IaaS

When preparing a critical application migration project to the public cloud, it might be tempting to simply rebuild your on-premises applications (the lift-and-shift approach). However, this method is not the best way to leverage your SAP investments on AWS.

In fact, Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud native services can simplify your infrastructure and reduce costs while ensuring a high level of availability. In this article, we’ll introduce you to 6 cloud native services.

1.    AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

KMS was designed to create and manage cryptographic keys. Each resource deployed on the cloud can be protected with a key. One of the benefits of using this service on the cloud is the automatic key rotation; a rotation is performed every 365 days, or less, depending on your preferences, to increase data security.

KMS is used for SAP to encrypt data each time we deploy disks or EC2 instances that contain critical data. To go above and beyond these measures, we can also combine KMS with AWS Backup to encrypt backups.

2.    AWS Network Load Balancer

This cloud native service on AWS allows you to distribute the workload on several servers. It’s a scalable tool that can absorb massive traffic (namely during times of peak demand for SAP systems), ensuring maximum performance.

This service is a critical element for high-availability SAP environments. To protect the frontend, we often use a network load balancer to distribute the traffic on SAP application servers located in various AWS zones.

3.    AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)

ACM is a certificate manager service that allows you to create, manage and renew your certificates with AWS.

It’s a significant advantage for SAP environments, which can contain hundreds of servers, and can involve as many certificates, if not more, to manage. Centralizing management of the certificates in the cloud ensures service continuity and prevents any potential oversight in renewing SSL certificates.

4.    AWS Backup

The name says it all! It’s a cloud native backup service that allows you to save EC2 instances and SAP databases, with their associated encryption and scheduling. It’s possible to define different keys for the production and development servers, for example.

Of course, this service fully supports SAP HANA Platform Edition 2.0 databases through the AWS Backint Agent service.

5.    Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

EFS is a storage service for Linux operating systems that allows you to create replicas of the NFS (Network File Storage). It supports NFSv4.1 and NFSv4.0 protocols. It’s also a File System shared across different availability zones simultaneously, to ensure high availability in all the zones where the EFS is located. The storage space offered by the AWS EFS service doesn’t need to be provisioned and it’s “unlimited!” There are also several EFS storage classes available that allow you to optimize the cost of service depending on usage.

In an SAP context, service keys mean flexibility and high availability. This type of File System, which can be shared or built as a NFS on several SAP Linux servers, can stock critical directories with the interface files or the directories necessary for HA cluster implementation, for example.

6.    AWS Lambda

Lambda is a FaaS solution (Function-as-a-Service) that allows code execution in response to events or to scheduling. Different entries can be programmed to trigger specific actions.

We can use snoozing as a simple example to show the advantages for SAP non-production servers. In fact, we can use AWS Lambda to schedule automatic stop and start for the servers and associated SAP applications to minimize platform costs. In addition, in certain monitoring contexts, Lambda offers increased responsiveness to incidents.

To conclude, integrating Amazon’s native cloud services allows you to maximize the management efficiency of your SAP applications. oXya integrates Amazon services with DevOps tools such as Terraform and Ansible. During technical architecture workshops with your team, oXya’s Cloud eXcellence team will demonstrate the different opportunities available to use these AWS cloud native services and minimize their costs. To know more about our services and support, contact our team of cloud architects today.

Alright, one last AWS cloud native service for the road: discover how to use SAP GUI with Amazon AppStream 2.0.