Renova Cloud reviewed the customer’s requirements and SAP landscape as described by SAP consultant partners and Application developers to design a suitable solution. The following main topics were identified as of importance to meet the needs of stakeholders:

• The SAP S/4 HANA workloads must be deployed in virtual servers meeting the SAP-certified configurations for server sizing, storage sizing and Operating System (OS)
• There should be multiple environments for production and non-production workloads with a proper separation between them; however avoiding over-engineered solution
• A single node configuration with HANA DB and Apps on the same server preferred
• Private connectivity from Pepsi premises and from external consultants required
• High Availability configuration for HANA is not required as long as the system is stable and the backups are managed orderly
• Cost-effectiveness: since the customer is located in Myanmar, there is a limited budget and so the solution must contain only the necessary services

Based on these high level requirements and detailed discussion with developers and consultants regarding the sizing and usage patterns, Renova Cloud drafted a solution on AWS. The infrastructure was deployed first and over the following one month, Renova Cloud supported the consultants and developers to implement the workloads and applications.

The main SAP workloads including 4 separate S/4 HANA environments and Solution Manager (SolMan) were deployed in large R5 type EC2 instances, leveraging the newest generation of AWS memory-optimized compute service. The lighter workloads such as SAP Router and bastion host were deployed using M5 instance type, suitable for general use. To alleviate the cost, the customer committed to 3 years of continuous usage, which allowed the purchase of Reserved Instances, achieving large savings on a monthly basis.

All SAP workloads use a storage configuration following SAP best practices, therefore multiple EBS volumes are associated with each HANA server to manage data, logs, shared and backup disks. The Operating System chosen for the servers is SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP Applications 15 which has specific optimizations for SAP workloads. Renova Cloud manages the SLES for SAP licensing on AWS Marketplace, with annual subscription to the OS providing additional savings.

The servers are located in a single VPC, avoiding complexity of multiple separate logical networks and reducing the operational overhead. The servers are located in public or private subnets depending on the need of external access. Security Groups are used with detailed rules settings to achieve the separation of the environments and to restrict unwanted access both from outside and from the different environments within the VPC.

The secure private connectivity to the AWS VPC is managed through two different managed VPN solutions. Between customer’s premises and AWS, a Site-to-Site VPN connection with a pair of tunnels is established, allowing connectivity of Pepsi users to their required interfaces. For the external consultants and developers, Client VPN is configured with the users as clients, and OpenVPN profiles distributed to the authorized users.

The overall architecture integrates many AWS services to support the SAP servers.