AWS Systems Manager for SAP goes GA - Do you really want to do that?
Enterprises running – or looking to run – SAP HANA in the cloud have got an improved proposition from AWS, with AWS Systems Manager for SAP generally available (GA) this week and offering new capabilities to operate, manage, and backup SAP applications on AWS more efficiently.
AWS Systems Manager for SAP is available in all commercial AWS Regions and lets users register their SAP HANA systems (single node and Highly Available) using the Application Manager console. HANA databases (single node) once registered can also then be managed by AWS Backup.
AWS Systems Manager for SAP is an automation capability to manage and operate SAP applications on AWS and Amazon describes it (inevitably) as providing "seamless integration between AWS services and SAP applications running on AWS" – part of a broader drive over the past 18 months by AWS to dramatically improve cross-service interoperability.
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The offering comes as SAP continues to nudge its customers towards the cloud; sometimes to their chagrin. SAP's products have been available on AWS for some years (Siemens being among the customers running SAP workloads primarily via EC2 for example) but many customers face the challenge of complex customisations and their dependencies.
(“Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of… members said last year that existing customisations present a challenge when moving to SAP S/4HANA. Some organisations may have amassed years-old legacy apps and thousands of lines of custom code. They understandably see these assets as a competitive advantage, and worry about losing it when they move to a standardised cloud solution,” as a UK user group puts it.)
AWS Systems Manager for SAP also lets users automate the patching and maintenance of SAP systems using the same automation documents as backup solutions, as well performance monitoring capabilities to track metrics like CPU utilization, memory usage, and disk I/O – helpful fo tracking performance issues and efficiency.
There’s a whole API reference guide here.
Those seriously considering this (other cloud options are, of course, available) can run AWS Application Discovery Service to understand hardware configuration, performance data, and network connections in your on-premises SAP HANA environment and use this to appropriate communication ports are enabled between SAP HANA and other systems in the security groups or AWS virtual private clouds.
This can be deployed in an agentless mode (for VMware environments) or with an agent-based mode (all VMs and physical servers).
