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SAP and AWS - Joint Reference Architectures To Maximize Utilization and Investments

SAP and AWS have collaborated to create Joint Reference Architectures (JRA) aimed at enhancing the integration of SAP applications with AWS services, thereby maximizing customer investments. The JRAs are organized into three key pillars: Data-to-Value Architecture, Integration and App Development, and Platform Foundation, each focusing on different aspects of data utilization and application development. This partnership aims to provide customers with secure, efficient, and high-availability solutions for their business needs while continuously evolving with new services and features.

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Yuri Sereda
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13 views12 pages

SAP and AWS - Joint Reference Architectures To Maximize Utilization and Investments

SAP and AWS have collaborated to create Joint Reference Architectures (JRA) aimed at enhancing the integration of SAP applications with AWS services, thereby maximizing customer investments. The JRAs are organized into three key pillars: Data-to-Value Architecture, Integration and App Development, and Platform Foundation, each focusing on different aspects of data utilization and application development. This partnership aims to provide customers with secure, efficient, and high-availability solutions for their business needs while continuously evolving with new services and features.

Uploaded by

Yuri Sereda
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SAP and AWS - Joint Reference Architectures to

maximize utilization and investments


https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/sap-and-aws-joint-reference-
architectures-to-maximize-utilization-and/ba-p/13549809

madankumarp
Product and Topic Expert Options

2022 Nov 15 7:21 PM


17 Kudos

15,697

 SAP Managed Tags:

 Data and Analytics,

 Cloud Integration,

 SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry runtime and environment,

 SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer, cloud edition ,

 Cloud Operations

SAP and AWS have been partnering since 2008 to innovate on behalf of our
customers to bring the flexibility and agility of the AWS platform to manage
SAP’s cloud applications and workloads. As a logical progression to this
partnership, SAP, and AWS have joined forces and have come up with a set of
Reference Architectures to tackle practical Business scenarios. These Joint
Reference Architectures (JRA) built by SAP & AWS will be the foundation for
building new applications, analytical dashboards, or machine learning models
for our customers. SAP & AWS are committed to updating and improving the
architecture with new services and features released by SAP and AWS in the
future.

Joint Reference Architecture (JRA)


The JRAs have been grouped under three logical pillars based on the key
business benefits to maximize the return on customers’ investments. The
architecture diagram above depicts a typical data flow across different layers
for an SAP on AWS setup. These architectures can be enhanced by customers
to fit their business needs.
1. Data-to-Value Architecture – Architecture patterns outlined in the data-
to-value pillar help customers to blend SAP data with non-SAP data. By securely
federating and blending data from SAP and AWS sources such as Amazon
Redshift, Amazon S3, and Amazon Athena through SAP Data Warehouse Cloud,
customers can do more efficient analysis, sales planning, financial planning,
and training of machine learning models.
2. Integration and App Development - In the Application Layer, the
integration and app development pillar provide a backbone for building
business-ready applications either by extending the existing ones or creating
new ones with custom logic and business rules. These applications can now
access data stored in external data stores such as Amazon Aurora and if
required, can also use predeveloped content or customized integration
protocols to interface with other business applications. Additionally, Edge
Integration Cell (EIC) enables seamless integration in scenarios where
applications must operate entirely within a private landscape, providing a
secure environment for managing critical integrations.

3. Platform Foundation - Platform Layer: Once these applications have been


built, they should also be made highly available to provide the best customer
experience. And there is also a need for customers to provide an intuitive and
simple interface to access their applications to increase adoptability. As
highlighted in the above architecture, SAP BTP services, such as the SAP
Launchpad service, can act as an entry point for these applications. And AWS
services like Amazon Route53 ensure a seamless experience by providing
resilience and high availability that complements SAP's Business Technology
Platform.

Data-to-Value Architecture

Data is one of the most valuable assets of any business. Customers usually
have their data hosted in various AWS cloud services with their mission-critical
data residing in business applications like SAP S/4HANA Cloud and BW/4HANA.
It is crucial that customers have access to this data in a consolidated, real-time
and secure environment so it can be easily consumable for practical
applications like Analytics, Machine Learning, Enterprise Planning, etc. The set
of architectural patterns listed below recommends the optimal ways to federate
data leveraging SAP BTP and AWS cloud services:

1. Assemble Distributed Data


One of the major requirements that SAP customers face is to figure out the best
approach to combine the distributed data from SAP and non-SAP systems. Now
with data federation-based architecture customers can bring together the data
from all the sources, to maximize value and draw insights from it. Consider a
customer scenario where IoT data is stored in Amazon Redshift and there is a
need to combine this data with business-critical processes and master data into
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. Now, this use case pattern can be addressed by
data federation from Amazon Redshift into SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

A similar pattern can be extended to use cases when data is stored in Amazon
Simple Storage Services (S3) and accessed via Amazon Athena. Customers can
now federate this data into SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to derive meaningful
insights. This use case has been covered with a recommended solution in the
blog for Data Federation with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud from Amazon Athena.
The highlight from the above scenarios is the ability for customers to federate
data securely while avoiding any replication making it more economical and
performant.

In both, the approaches data federated from AWS to SAP Data Warehouse
Cloud can be visualized in SAP Analytics Cloud.

2. Machine Learning to Maximize value from the


Federated Data

Machine learning is one of the key pillars of digital transformation. To set up an


effective machine learning algorithm a comprehensive insight into how
processes work and what data is being consumed is required. With a service
like Amazon SageMaker, customers can now draw insights and set up the
baseline for the ML algorithm. Additionally, SAP’s FedML library will enable this
by facilitating access to the right data while avoiding replications. SAP’s
recommended approach on how to utilize Amazon SageMaker to build Machine
Learning Models on federated data to train, predict and write back results to
SAP systems has been discussed in the blog.

3. Enterprise Planning
As an operational or financial planner, you want to have access to your data so
you can analyze, plan, and forecast. This data might reside in SAP (applications
like Analytics cloud and Data warehouse cloud) or non-SAP applications. This
architectural pattern will allow you to have a consolidated view of the data and
extend it into SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to allow effective enterprise planning.
More details on this approach with implementation steps have been discussed
here: Enterprise Planning with AWS data using SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and
SAP Analytics Cloud

4. Federate SAP Data into AWS

For use cases, when data is predominantly stored in an AWS data service but
still needs to blend with SAP’s business-critical data, we recommend this
architecture pattern where data from sap applications like SAP Data Warehouse
Cloud will be federated into Amazon Athena. Details on this architecture along
with implementation steps have been discussed in this blog: Querying SAP Data
Warehouse Cloud from Amazon Athena using Amazon Athena Federated Query

Business value

Customers who have leveraged their existing investments in SAP and AWS have
maximized the return. The reference architectures and guides on how to
federate data to perform business-critical operations like Enterprise Planning
and Machine Learning are helping them to derive more value. These guidelines
will ensure the following key benefits:

o Securely federate data both into and from SAP sources

o Avoid building complex data replication pipelines

o Real-time access to data

o Reduced data storage costs


Integration and App Development

SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) framework has been widely
adopted by many customers to build enterprise-grade services and
applications. Customers often face situations when these CAP applications must
consume not only SAP data (stored in SAP S4/HANA for example) but also non-
SAP data stored in other databases like Amazon Aurora. Additionally, when CAP
applications require secure integration within private landscapes, Edge
Integration Cell (EIC) offers an effective way to manage these hybrid scenarios.
Ensuring that such CAP applications perform efficiently and are durable and
resilient is very important. Enhancing these CAP applications with other
practical features like notifications has also been discussed below:

1. Durable and Resilient applications

A CAP application with SAP S/4HANA data integration along with non-SAP data
stored in Amazon Aurora can be made more durable and resilient by
implementing a replica at the database level, especially for read operations.
This read replica implementation of Amazon Aurora along with Amazon Route53
outlines the architecture customers can leverage to build highly available CAP
applications. The core idea is about creating a read replica for Amazon Aurora,
preferably in a different region, and augmenting with auto-scaling policies.
More details about this implementation with solution architecture and
implementation steps have been explained in this blog: Distributed Resiliency
of SAP CAP applications using Amazon Aurora (Read Replica) with Amazon
Route ...

2. Real-time Notifications

Real-time event-based notifications like Email, SMS or push notifications could


prove vital for critical applications that demand immediate actions. This blog
details one such scenario with a recommendation on how SAP Event Mesh can
be combined with Amazon SNS to send notifications based on events triggered
from SAP S4/HAHA

3. Edge Integration Cell

When CAP applications require secure integration with SAP systems in a private
landscape, Edge Integration Cell (EIC) offers an ideal solution. While
integration content can be designed and monitored in the cloud, EIC ensures
that deployment and execution remain entirely within the customer’s managed
private environment, thereby avoiding network latency and maintaining full
control over the integration process. For more details on how to set up and use
EIC, refer to this blog: Getting Started with Edge Integration Cell on AWS: A
Setup Guide Using SAP Integration Suite

Business value

This section will come in relevant for all customers looking to build enterprise-
grade SAP Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model-based applications with
distributed data. The JRAs in this section will elaborate on how to make these
CAP applications resilient and durable thus delivering the following benefits:

o Durable application, that is highly available

o Reliability of distributed data

o Resilient applications with trusted Integration

o Reduced latency

o Real-time push Notifications that guarantee faster response times


o Secure Applications that can operate entirely on private networks
Platform Foundation

1. High Availability

As the trends indicate, high availability is an implicit expectation from the


customers of any critical service. A highly available solution could make a
difference in providing a seamless customer experience. The architecture
outlined in the blog explains how to make SAP BTP Launchpad service Highly
Available (HA) by using Amazon Route53 service. This concept can be extended
to other BTP services, like the SAP Cloud Platform Integration, too. Details about
that will be shared in the upcoming blogs.

2. Geography-based content delivery

The HA scenario discussed above and the Amazon Aurora read replica
architecture discussed under the Integration and App Development section,
both, utilize Amazon Route53 to act as the front-end DNS resolution tool.
Amazon Route53’s traffic control policy provides customers the flexibility to
build redirection rules based on geographic location. This feature equips
customers to build solutions that can deliver content based on end users'
location providing the flexibility to avoid any latency and to deliver relevant
local content.

Business value

The architectures in this section address one of the mandatory requirements of


every business-critical service – High Availability (HA). Recommendations on
how to make your BTP services like SAP Launchpad highly available to ensure
the following advantages:

o Stability and Availability of the service

o Geo-location-based content delivery

o Positive customer experience

o Load balancing and distribution

What to expect next?


SAP-AWS Partnership

The partnership between SAP and AWS will be one of the highlights of TechEd
2022 with a session DT200 dedicated to the same. AWS re:Invent 2022 will also
have a joint session to draw attention to these joint reference architectures
which for sure will truly benefit our customers and partners.
In the future, SAP and AWS teams will continue to collaborate and identify more
use cases and services to be combined into reference architectures. We will
continue to publish all these findings and more related materials in the future.

Credits

The above reference architectures are the results of teamwork and


contributions from both SAP and AWS. I would like to thank the following SAP
team members for their efforts: Sangeetha Krishnamoorthy, Weikun Liu,
Mahesh Kumar Palavalli, Shanthakumar Krishnaswamy, and Sandesh Shinde.
And Sivakumar N, Martin Frick, Uwe Klasing, and Anirban Majumdar for their
support and guidance.

And special thanks to the following AWS team members for their inputs and
feedback: Sunny Patwari, Sabareesan Radhakrishnan, Rajesh Chigurupati,
Amrish Patel, Renga Sridharan, and Soulat Khan.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or contact us


at [email protected].

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