Updated SAP Lens for the Well-Architected Framework now includes the Sustainability Pillar and self-service tool

In 2021, AWS released the SAP Lens for Well-Architected Framework. Today we are pleased to announce Version 2.0 of the SAP Lens for Well-Architected Framework for general use by customers and partners to improve their SAP on AWS workloads with the latest AWS guidance and an added sustainability focus.

Over the past year we have seen significant adoption of the SAP Lens by customers and partners when migrating, building and operating SAP on AWS. Our customers have told us that the SAP Lens is a valuable source of best practices when reviewing and designing SAP workloads to maximize the value they receive from AWS.

AWS is committed to the SAP Lens as a living tool. As SAP’s products evolve and new AWS services become available, we update the SAP Lens accordingly. Our mission will always be to help you design, deploy and operate well-architected applications so that you can focus on delivering on your business objectives.

In this blog, we will walk you through what has changed in the SAP Lens: the addition of a new sustainability pillar, the ability to run a self-service assessment in the AWS Well-Architected Tool and the addition of various SAP-focused service updates and new guidance.

What has changed?

Sustainability has been included as a new pillar in the SAP Lens

With a growing focus from our customers on environmental impact, the new SAP Lens adds a sixth pillar – “Sustainability” to align with the general AWS Well-Architected Framework. The sustainability pillar helps organizations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing and contains suggestions to optimize your SAP workload to reduce environmental impact.

As we did with the other five pillars of the SAP Lens, we endeavored to take the best practices espoused in the Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar and provide specific guidance and examples relevant to running SAP workloads in AWS. The good news for SAP on AWS customers is that if they are already following the recommendations in the SAP Lens Cost Optimization Pillar, they are running their cloud-based infrastructure in a more sustainable fashion. Cost optimization suggestions such as not oversizing your instances, regularly cleaning up Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots, and archiving or deleting unneeded backups can all reduce your compute and storage requirements, decreasing both cost and environmental impact in tandem.

Rather than replicate guidance from the general Well Architected Pillar, the SAP Lens Sustainability Pillar provides suggestions on changing business objectives to run SAP more sustainably and provides insight into tradeoffs with other pillars when a company decides to prioritize SAP sustainability. The pillar also suggests methods and tools to measure decreases in environmental impact as you modify your SAP architecture design.

The SAP Lens can now be run in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

A common request from our customers has been to enable them to run a “self service” SAP Lens review in the AWS Well-Architected console tool. Today we are pleased to provide the SAP Lens for Well-Architected in JSON format, for use as a custom lens in the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

This release will allow you and your partners to run a guided SAP Lens review in your AWS account, share the results with your team and track closure of risks in the console tool.

Best practices have been updated with new SAP on AWS services and customer feedback

The Version 2.0 release of the SAP Lens incorporates the latest suggestions for the use of new and improved SAP on AWS services and several readability and hyperlink updates based on customer feedback received in the past year. New SAP on AWS Services such as CloudWatch Application Insights for SAP HANA, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (certified for HANA workloads) and EBS IO2 Block Express (certified for HANA) continue to help our customers improve their operational excellence, performance and scalability and have been added to pillar best practices where appropriate.

Finally, we have added a specific Customer Feedback Survey for the SAP Lens to help us capture customer satisfaction and suggested improvements. You can find the link to this survey in the Providing Feedback section. Please consider filling out this survey upon completion of a well-architected review with the SAP Lens so that we can continue to improve our best practice guidance and remain the best place to run SAP workloads.

About the SAP Lens

The SAP Lens for the AWS-Well Architected Framework is a collection of customer-proven design principles and best practices to help you adopt a cloud-native approach to running SAP on AWS. These recommendations are based on insights that AWS has gathered from customers, AWS Partners, and our own SAP technical specialist communities.

The lens highlights some of the most common areas for assessment and improvement. Designed to align with and provide insights across the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:

• Operational excellence focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. SAP topics include monitoring and automation approaches.
• Security focuses on protecting information and systems. SAP topics include data protection and system access.
• Reliability focuses on ensuring a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. SAP topics include maximizing the availability benefits of cloud and reviewing the protection and recovery approaches for various failure scenarios.
• Performance efficiency focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. SAP topics include sizing and ensuring that performance benchmarks for SAP Support are met.
• Cost optimization focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs. SAP topics include scaling and reservation strategies aligned with the workload requirements.
• Sustainability – focuses on environmental impacts, especially energy consumption and efficiency, since they are important levers for architects to inform direct action to reduce resource usage. SAP topics include right-sizing, operational shutdowns and monitoring carbon impact.

Across all pillars, we also focus on highlighting the support and compatibility requirements of SAP and the database and operating system vendors which make up the technology stack.

How to run the SAP Lens Well-Architected review in your own AWS account

The SAP Lens is available as a custom lens JSON file for the AWS Well-Architected Tool .

This file can be uploaded to the AWS Well-Architected Tool in the management console of your AWS account and will pre-provision the SAP design principles, best practices and suggestions in a checklist format along with helpful resources.

As you work through the checklist, risks can be identified and comments can be captured. A final report is available in PDF or HTML format for sharing with stakeholders to document risks and future recommendations. Open risks can be managed and assigned in the tool and milestone reviews be performed.

The high-level steps to enable the SAP Lens in your AWS account are:

1. Download the SAP Lens custom lens JSON from here.
2. Create a new Well-Architected Custom Lens (see Step #6) based on the JSON file downloaded.
3. Publish the custom Lens in your AWS Account and share it with colleagues.
4. Begin a new Well-Architected review for your SAP workload (see Step #14) and select the “SAP Lens for Well-Architected” framework when prompted to choose a lens.

Further information on the AWS Well-Architected Tool, custom lens, reports and the risk dashboard is available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool documentation.

Next Steps

The SAP Lens Version 2.0 is available now on the AWS Documentation site as a PDF download for customers to use in a self-service fashion, or in JSON format to use as a Custom lens in the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

If you require additional expert guidance, contact your AWS account team to engage a local SAP specialist solution architect or the AWS Professional Services SAP specialty practice.

Learn more about supported SAP solutions, customer case studies and additional resources on our SAP on AWS website.

Join the SAP on AWS Discussion

In addition to your customer account team and AWS Support channels, we have recently launched re:Post – A Reimagined Q&A Experience for the AWS Community. Our SAP on AWS Solution Architecture team regularly monitor the SAP on AWS topic for discussion and questions that could be answered to assist our customers and partners. If your question is not support-related, consider joining the discussion over at re:Post and adding to the community knowledge base.