Best Practice 20.5 – Review usage for opportunities to optimize - SAP Lens

Best Practice 20.5 – Review usage for opportunities to optimize

Review your SAP workload periodically to identify opportunities to optimize cost. Regular reviews should focus on: minimizing the differences and anomalies found between your AWS bill and your SAP workload budget, checking that all your SAP cloud resources are appropriately sized and not over-provisioned, and understanding any new AWS service releases or cost reductions that could improve the cost effectiveness of your SAP workload.

Suggestion 20.5.1 – Minimize additional cost where your usage has been higher than initially planned

Your cloud usage might have grown outside of your estimated cost model due to unplanned business events or additional performance required. Analyze these changes with a view to optimizing the new cost. Consider additional Savings Plan commitments or Reserved Instances if this is a sustained change.

Where additional capacity is required for only short periods, consider horizontal scaling mechanisms (for example, additional SAP application servers) using automatic scaling or scheduled On-Demand Instance capacity to minimize cost further.

Suggestion 20.5.2 – Review SAP workload usage metrics and further right-size where possible

Regularly review the components supporting your SAP system to ensure they are right-sized. Use CloudWatch metrics to consider:

  • Is the SAP EC2 compute the right size? Is CPU or memory utilization low? Could you move to a smaller EC2 instance size?

  • Is SAP storage the right size? Is there excess space provisioned but unused? Could you reduce volume sizes?

  • Is SAP storage appropriately performant? Is there excess IOPS or MBPS provisioned which could be reduced?

  • Are backup and snapshots being managed appropriately? Do you have too many backup copies on S3 Standard which could be archived to Amazon S3 Infrequently Accessed or Amazon S3 Glacier?

  • Use tools such as AWS Compute Optimizer and AWS Trusted Advisor to identify additional areas for optimization. Be aware of SAP specific compute and storage restrictions as per SAP note: 1656099 - SAP Applications on AWS: Supported DB/OS and Amazon EC2 products [Requires SAP Portal Access].

Use your findings to continually right-size your SAP workload components on a regular basis and maximize your use of Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.

Suggestion 20.5.3 – Understand new AWS services and plan to implement where further cost optimization can be achieved

AWS regularly releases new services and periodically reduces prices. Review new SAP on AWS service announcements and plan to take advantage of these in your architecture at a minimum every 12 months. If you have a technical account manager (TAM) as part of an Enterprise Support agreement with AWS, they can assist you in a regular new service briefing and optimization discussion.

Subscribe to the SAP on AWS blog and the What’s New feed for the latest announcements and news.

See [Operational Excellence]: Best Practice 4.4 - Perform regular workload reviews to optimize for resiliency, performance, agility, and cost for further information on continued optimization of your SAP workload.