Welcome to this quarter’s edition of our SAP on AWS Innovation Newsletter, Lemongrass’s regular communication detailing the new features, capabilities, and market updates that drive new innovations and optimizations into SAP-Centric workloads on AWS.
Like the team here at Lemongrass, many of you may be feeling the current “time compression” phenomenon. Despite lockdowns, trip cancellations, and the bedroom-to-spare-office transformations, half the year has somehow slipped by. A positive outcome from all this extra time saved from commuting, queuing, and traveling is that the volume of new technology innovations in the SAP on AWS universe has been unprecedented. It’s much more than we can pack into one newsletter but we’ve listed below highlights from the last 12 weeks that have driven the most improvements for our customers:
A big release for us was AWS’s brand new EC2 C5a instances which are now on the SAP certified list. This is great news on a few fronts. Firstly, the C5 systems leverage the EPYC generation processors which are ~10% cheaper being based on AMD than on their comparable stablemates. Secondly, these EC2 types offer the cheapest bang for the buck for compute-intensive workloads and, in 8 size configs going up to 96vCPU/192GB, leverage fast local NVMe instance storage. You can access these new systems at the speed of a simple reboot.
Backups. Everybody needs them, nobody likes paying over the odds for what is a very rarely used function. This quarter, AWS released support & SAP certification for BackINT for HANA instances enabling a cheap and easy way to backup directly into S3. From there you can age image to the cheaper S3 IA and down into the uber-cheap Glacier tiers. For us, this means we can now adopt a full native AWS backup solution for HANA systems, further reducing costs in our Automation management platform.
Whilst on the topic of backups, as of this quarter AWS Backup (and AWS organizations) finally supports cross-account management meaning you can now manage and monitor backups across accounts and regions all within the native AWS tooling. This also means we can move other operations feature back to AWS standard.
You may recall AWS acquired TSO-Logic earlier last year. As of July 20th, it has now been updated and re-launched as the AWS Migration Evaluator. It’s a powerful tool that both discovers systems inside existing cloud and on-premise landscapes (intelligently as it detects CPU generations, disk type, utilization, etc.) and builds a suggested target state config & price in AWS. It also helps build a TCO summary, useful in any SAP migration business case.
Lemongrass is through and through an AWS Well-Architected certified organization forming part of our technical design patterns and Migration & Operation methodologies. Just this week the main pillars have all had a major update. This is the first major update for a while and we’d recommend getting up to speed on these recommended design principles as they cover updates and learnings from the last few years of running Enterprise applications.
EC2 now supports tagging on Spot instances that were lacking the past. Spot instances are often overlooked but with a hefty ~90% price saving and now with the ability to tag, they offer a large optimization benefit for low priority systems such as SBX / training events. To help even further the AWS Marketplace AMIs are also now supported on Spot instances opening up their use for third-party supported solutions.
You may have seen from our social media that we supported the launch of the new AWS SAP Launch Wizard earlier in the quarter. This tool is an excellent way to automate the build of SAP HANA and NetWeaver. Since then, further upgrades to the SAP Launch Wizard now allow for it to be integrated with Route 53 natively. If you are building a supported SAP Launch Wizard system (HANA / NetWeaver combos) today, you can choose an R53 hosted zone as the domain name, creating the R53 DNS records and removing the need to maintain the usual etc/hosts file. The update also includes a new proxy config option in the tool in the event you also have outbound internet-facing interfaces.
Whilst on the topic of improvements, EFS has also been updated with a new SLA of 4×9’s, a 10x improvement over the original, that will further help to shore up SLA metrics that leverage EFS services – at no additional charge!
At Lemongrass, we use Cost Explorer quite extensively as part of our monthly price optimization checks. This tool just got a very useful update and now includes the EC2 rightsizing recommendations enabling a quick and easy way to determine whether you should downsize based on how you’re using your current system or if you should look at auto-scaling.
If you didn’t notice, another EC2 price slash landed this quarter. With an SAP-certified lens on the M, C & R 5 series, families have all been dropped with discounts of up to 18%. So, if you are running a similar spec machine in another family group, we would recommend reviewing if you can migrate. This is achievable at the speed of a reboot.
In closing, though we are floating in unchartered waters with economies in turmoil, struggles with new ways of working, and a turbulent global outlook, these times seem to have focused some technical minds. Over the last quarter, Lemongrass has seen an acceleration, not just on traditional bottom-line cost-saving, but also in innovation in and around SAP landscapes to drive top-line improvements. From using native AWS storage and ML services to build SAP fed Data Lakes and discovering pattern correlations that have resulted in leading to sales and business improvements, to changing business cultures to enable more efficient ways of working like DevOps for SAP. As history keeps reminding us, challenge and innovation are very often the biggest catalysts for change.
