This week, Amazon Web Service (AWS) is hosting their yearly convention for users and partners worldwide to gather in Las Vegas, NV for a week of announcements, labs, breakout sessions and fun events known as AWS re:Invent. Year after year, AWS has pulled out all of the stops in order to educate and reward their user base. With 50,000+ participants, 7 venues, and thousands of unique opportunities to learn about and participate with all of AWS’ diverse offerings, re:Invent 2018 is no exception.

Having recently achieved the “Select” tier of AWS partnership (the name of the tier changed this week) CONTAX is delighted to be participating in re:Invent to further deepen our relationship with AWS and meet with customers who are already leveraging the power and flexibility of SAP workloads running on AWS..

It’s easy to get lost in the glitz and glamour of the new announcements. Including, but not limited to, a new racing league to show the ease of use of reinforcement based machine learning, the associated hardware so you can hone your machine learning skills and race at home, AWS producing their own processors to reduce cost on their new instance family, and new EC2 instance types across the board. A typical SAP user is left asking, “What does all of this mean for me?”

Beyond the obvious good sign that AWS is continuing to innovate and take the necessary risks to remain the industry leader in cloud computing, there are some very tangible updates which will have a real impact in the SAP space.

SAP-focused learning and innovation sessions

As SAP users and Partners, we’d all prefer that all events and breakout sessions be directly related to SAP. Though that will never be the case at re:Invent, there are quite a few sessions focused on SAP workloads in the AWS cloud which had some very interesting insights. The following sessions were quite informative and had a great turnout:

- ENT219-R - The New Normal for Mission-Critical SAP Workloads
- GPSTEC322 - Beyond Infrastructure for SAP on AWS
- GPSBUS204 - Tapping into Key Enterprise Workloads: SAP, VMware, & Microsoft on AWS
- BAP349-S - Accelerate SAP Workloads on AWS High-Memory Instances Powered by Intel
- CMP418-R - Optimize Your SAP HANA Workloads with Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances
- DEM86 - Supporting an Early Cancer Detection Vision with SAP S/4HANA on AWS
- DEM74 - SAP HANA as a Service & AWS: Embracing a Cloud-Native and Cloud-First Mindset

Bare-Metal Instances

SAP users are often concerned about the sheer computational requirements of converting their existing environments to a HANA DB-backed version. The in-memory database needs are substantial, and if a company migrates their system to AWS, they want to know that they can grow their business as quickly as possible and not have to worry about outgrowing the limits of their cloud hosting provider.

Enter AWS EC2 High Memory Instances Offering 6 TB, 9 TB and 12TB of memory per instance, you’d be very hard-pressed to outgrow these EC2 instances, even with the very largest in-memory HANA DB. Plus they’re SAP certified for HANA production environments at the time of this announcement!

Just check out these specs:

Machine Learning, IoT and the rest

While it may not be immediately apparent, growth in AWS’ service offerings are always a good thing for SAP.. If your company is anything like CONTAX, you have a team of excited developers jumping into the SAP Cloud Platform headfirst. And every new API, from machine learning, to IoT, to text to speech, to image recognition, creates a new opportunities for your developers to focus on innovating and improving your business and spend less time building tools that AWS offers at an extremely competitive price.

All of these announcement are just the tip of the iceberg and we as a community will see over the coming weeks and months how AWS’ network of motivated builders put these new offerings to use.