How to Deploy SAP S/4 HANA Quick Start on Amazon Cloud Services

SAP has entered into a partnership with Amazon Cloud Services (AWS). This alignment has fostered business to leverage several benefits.  These include bringing more agility and security as compared to on-premises. Also, AWS enables SAP customers to adopt evolving technologies to progress faster.

AWS is also helping SAP-based companies with on-demand servers, data storage, and networking facilities.  It allows these companies to seamlessly run their SAP systems.

Amazon Cloud Services has now introduced AWS Quick Start for SAP S/4 HANA. Business enterprises can deploy SAP S/4 HANA workloads on AWS Cloud in less than 3 hours. On the other hand, if you go with the traditional approach using manual service, it will take several days to complete the same task.

SAP S/4 HANA is the advanced ERP Business Suite supporting enterprise business activities. It is optimized for SAP HANA in-memory databases. The SAP customers receive support from Amazon EC2 High Memory instances for scaling the SAP HANA database. Customers can also take advantage of S/4 HANA with AWS Cloud supporting deployments of all sizes. For instance, S/4 HANA on AWS supports both up to 12 TB and 48 TB of memory for very large deployments.

A Brief Discussion on AWS Quick Start for SAP S/4 HANA

The AWS Cloud architects created a deployment automation tool, which is known as AWS Quick Start for SAP S/4 HANA. This automation tool has been designed for AWS CloudFormation, Shell Scripts, and Python.

The Quick Start maximizes the use of SAP, AWS, and Linux to establish an AWS landscape automatically for running S/4 HANA system. Furthermore, AWS Quick Starts helps in automation of SAP workload deployment. You can also check out Quick Starts for different SAP-based products and services such as SAP Business One, SAP HANA, and SAP NetWeaver.

SAP S/4HANA Quick Start Components and Deployment Options

Quick Starts comprises of various Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and AWS Core Infrastructure services.  It deploys S/4 HANA into a virtual private cloud present on an AWS account. It offers a couple of deployment options including –

• Single-Scenario Standard Deployment
• Multi-Scenario Distributed Deployment

Also, you have to choose between Amazon Elastic File System and Network File System to share the file system. You can also look to deploy a bastion host and Remote Desktop Protocol server. 

The Quick Start Components are categorized into two categories – 

• Primary Resources
• Secondary Resources

The primary resource consists of SAP HANA primary database, SAP S/4 HANA Primary Application Server, and S/4 HANA ABAP SAP Central Services server.

The secondary resource comprises SAP HANA secondary database, SAP S/4 HANA Standby ABAP SAP Central Services server, secondary  SAP S/4HANA Additional Application server, and an optional bastion host and RDP instances.

AWS Quick Start uses SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) to help build an SAP HANA database with high availability. It also allows you to create a standby ASCS server for high availability to secure critical SAP workloads from availability zone outrages.

Please have a look at the table below, that points out both primary and secondary deployment options for SAP S/4 HANA on AWS.

We are showcasing two images that depict the deployment options for S/4 HANA in new and existing Virtual Private Cloud.

Deployment of the new VPC

Deployment of Existing VPC 

Various Deployment Steps

Let’s learn the different steps of deploying SAP SAP S/4 HANA into Amazon Web Cloud Services.

Login into your AWS Account

First, sign in into your AWS account with IAM user roles to get the necessary permission. Please ensure the configuration of your AWS account. And also, fulfill the technical requirements to carry out the deployment process.

Download SAP Software

The next step is downloading and installing the SAP software. However, this is an optional step. You can even skip it if you want.

If you are not installing the SAP software, then you need to download various other software used by Quick Start deployment.

Different software versions include Software Provisioning Manager (SWPM) 2.0 SP01-10, HANA20 SP03Rev33, SAP Kernel 7.73, SAP Hostagent 7.21, and more.

Launching a Quick Start

In the third step, you need to launch the Quick Start. Start by signing into your AWS account and then choose the deployment option to release AWS CloudFormation Template. We have already discussed the deployment options before.

You need to check the region, displayed in the upper right corner of the navigation bar. Keep the default settings on the template page and change the stack name on the specified detail page.

Besides these, there are some other pages such as options pages and review pages where you need to specify tags, review and confirm template settings.

Testing the Deployment

Once you have launched the Quick Start, it’s time to test the deployed SAP S/4 HANA systems and access SAP level.

You can use the SAP GUI from RDP. Also, you can make use of SSH from the bastion host to access the operating system level.

S/4 HANA Architecture on AWS

The SAP S/4 HANA architecture is either a standard deployment of a typical four-server S/4 HANA cluster with HANA database.

The following image will illustrate the point further.

The second type of architecture is a typical four server high availability cluster that hosts the primary SAP Hana database.

Begin Your SAP Journey on AWS

Amazon Web Services offers various benefits to SAP customers and partners. The services include getting on-demand access to servers, cloud storage, and networking. AWS is known to be a self-service where customers only pay for what they use. Amazon Web Services supports SAP modules to build JavaScript-based applications. AWS reduces the time for infrastructure procurement and provision to only a few hours instead of days or weeks.

Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/07/12/how-to-deploy-sap-s4-hana-quick-start-on-amazon-cloud-services/