Best Practice 4.4 – Perform regular workload reviews to optimize for resiliency, performance, agility, and cost - SAP Lens

Best Practice 4.4 – Perform regular workload reviews to optimize for resiliency, performance, agility, and cost

When running SAP on AWS, plan and dedicate time and resources for continual incremental improvement to evolve the effectiveness and efficiency of your workload. AWS regularly releases new services, approaches, improved SLAs, and price reductions that you can take advantage of to optimize your SAP workload. Understand and validate whether new service releases are applicable to your SAP workload and, where appropriate, implement them in your production environment to evolve your workload.

Suggestion 4.4.1 - Plan regular reviews of your SAP workload

Work with your AWS team, AWS Partner, or internal experts to periodically review your SAP workload using the Well-Architected Framework SAP Lens (this document). Plan to review your workload at least every once a year. Identify, validate, and prioritize improvement activities and issue remediation and incorporate this into your backlog.

Consider harvesting your learnings from operational incidents into curated questions with best practices guidance. Create Operational Readiness Review (ORR) runbooks to assist when deploying new SAP landscapes, applications, or workloads.

Suggestion 4.4.2 - Review Amazon EC2 instance sizing and performance

Review the CPU usage and memory utilization of your SAP workload by validating historical CloudWatch metrics. Review each SAP component for low CPU or memory utilization and consider right sizing EC2 instances to better match workload requirements. Consider newly released and SAP-certified EC2 instance types for performance fit and cost optimization. Plan to take advantage of new improvements in your operational backlog.

See Cost Optimization for Amazon EC2 usage in SAP workloads.

Suggestion 4.4.3 - Review Amazon EBS sizing and performance

Review storage usage across your SAP workload by validating volume consumption, throughput and IOPS usage from CloudWatch historical metrics. Review each SAP component for oversized storage or low throughput/IOPS utilization and consider right sizing Amazon EBS storage sizes and types in order to better match workload requirements. Consider newly released and SAP certified Amazon EBS types for performance fit and cost optimization. Plan to take advantage of new improvements in your operational backlog

Suggestion 4.4.4 - Review new services that improve agility or improve efficiency in your SAP workload operations

Review new supporting service releases that could improve operations in your SAP workload. If you have a technical account manager (TAM) as part of an AWS Support agreement, they can assist you in a new service briefing and optimization discussion.

Consider new releases such as shared file storage, interface services (for example, AWS Transfer, API Gateway), security services (for example, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Firewall), backup tools (for example, AWS Backint) and automation tools (for example, Launch Wizard for SAP).

Plan to take advantage of new improvements in your operational backlog.

Suggestion 4.4.5 - Monitor SAP on AWS blogs and announcements

Consider subscribing to the SAP on AWS Blog feed and AWS “What’s New” feed to stay up to date with newly released service announcements, innovation approaches and price reductions.

Suggestion 4.4.6 - Plan periodic enhancement work to take advantage of new and improved AWS services

Ensure that your operational budget allows for planned support team effort for implementation and testing of new AWS services and workload evolution on a periodic basis.