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CONTAX @ #AWSSUMMIT Sydney

2019-06-01
by Aaron Arokiaraj

AWS recently hosted a well organised expo showcasing the best, latest and greatest innovations on the cloud platform. These multi-region events are a great opportunity for those who are unable to make the trip across to Re:Invent.

There were over 100+ sessions on offer covering almost every service that AWS offers. These presentations are well tailored to suit both the business and technical skill sets of the participants and it was incredibly easy to pick and choose sessions, tailored to our needsinterest.

The keynote presentations on both days were brilliant. Day 1 had Glenn Gore, Worldwide Solutions Architect for AWS give a presentation on global insights and local customer stories on how organisations of all sizes are already using AWS to drive greater business efficiency and innovate faster for customers. Day 2 had Oliver Klein who heads emerging technologies (APAC) at AWS give us a very interesting talk on innovation driven through AI and machine learning.

The main keynote speakers were supplemented by customers who would step in to showcase how their business had changed because of AWS implementations. Clients as varied as Formula1 to the Little Ripper Life Saver drone gave insightful presentations to behind the scenes activities at their businesses with a focus on R&D, game theory, machine learning and big data mining.

Grainne Kearns from food and beverage company Lion explained to us how their business was transformed by implementing an SAP stack based on S/4 HANA and AWS infrastructure-as-a-service. The distributors and stockists of Lion’s beer products - see what stock is available at what price and lets them place and track orders right up to when the shipment will arrive. It was interesting to hear that there was a change not only in the IT infrastructure as a result of this implementation, but also company culture and attitude. Over 550+ Legacy applications were replaced by the new SCM system.

AWS Senior Solutions architect Santosh Choudhary gave an insightful presentation on migrating SAP workloads to AWS. Rehosting and replatforming to newer technologies can easily be carried out during migration processes by leveraging AWS Services such as AWS DataSync and EFS while relying on fan favourites EC2 and S3 to provide main compute and storage. Snowball can also be used for moving large amounts of sensitive data from places with slower connection speeds.

Older flavours of SAP can now transform directly to S/4 HANA leveraging SAP DMO with system move. Proof of Concepts for clients can now be more easily demonstrated by implementing SAP Rapid Migration test program (FAST). It really is wonderous world we live in where hardware acquisition and infrastructure can be carried out via mere mouse clicks, as opposed to climbing through server racks with flashlights in decades preceding.



Another fine example of how AWS is always looking to help make our lives easier is the introduction to SAP Serverless Refreshes, using step functions and Lambda calls. This will allow our customers to cut down on costs and utilized time while allowing consultants to also have a more well-balanced lifestyle. That is often the greatest challenge in IT consulting.

Security was an over-hanging theme of the whole event and we at CONTAX strive to maintain data integrity and the trust our clients place in us by keeping pace with the newest tools on offer.

About the author: Aaron Arokiaraj

Aaron is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect who when not working with SAP in the cloud, is out fishing in the Australian sun.