5 Tips: We Built an SAP Fiori Development Landscape on the Amazon Cloud

I realize that’s a pretty obvious statement these days, but in the world of SAP and large enterprise ERP software, the cloud is just barely getting started.

At Mindset, we’re diving headfirst into SAP Fiori development and plan to have our first apps up on the SAP App Store before the summer is out (assuming the summer ever starts in Minneapolis).

There was really no other choice in my mind, but to build our development landscape on the Amazon Cloud. Who wants to deal with failed disks, renting data center space, shipping servers, and everything else that goes along with building an operational ERP landscape? We had our virtual systems up and running in less than a day with a virtual private cloud and started to build our full landscape. All said and done, it took about two weeks to have everything running.

Here’s what we built:

• SAP ERP 6 Enhancement Package 6 – IDES – We didn’t want to go about creating demo content ourselves and spending weeks configuring ERP from scratch
• Netweaver 7.4 with Gateway – This is the system that serves all of the Fiori content
• Solution Manager 7.1 – Words cannot describe how much I dislike Solution Manager — at least words that are appropriate to put on a blog… (see my bonus rant at the end) but this is needed nonetheless
• Other stuff – Web dispatchers, SAPRouter, VPN

 

1. Create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – When you create a new Amazon EC2 instance, you can either put it publicly on the Internet, or in a Virtual Private Cloud. Because of the significant amount of communication between all of the SAP Systems, if these systems were on the public part of Amazon, you would have to make firewall Swiss Cheese to get them connected (not as good as real Swiss Cheese).
2. Red Hat Linux 6.5, 64-bit, m3.xlarge – Use these instances for the primary Netweaver systems (ERP, SolMan, and Gateway) and use small instances for everything else. These configurations provide just enough power to keep our developers happy, but not break the bank. This note really helps: 1496410 – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x: Installation and Upgrade.
3. Create more disk space than you think – Extending your disk space on Amazon Cloud is not overly difficult, but once you do the downloads, install, extraction and upgrades, you will start to eat up 100’s of GB in no time. Do this early and save yourself the trouble.
4. Start with Solution Manager – Did I mention my lack of love for Solution Manager? Upgrade this to the latest and greatest, get all the extras finished on this first. This will make your other installations a breeze later.
5. Create snapshots and AMI’s (Amazon Machine Images) – Once you have your system up and running, create one big AMI – Amazon Machine Image. It’s amazing how easy this is, and it encapsulates an entire system backup. After that, doing snapshots of just your database is easy. Backups in the cloud are so beautiful.

Bonus rant:

I don’t like Solution Manager. I get why it’s there, I just don’t like it. Take for example your system landscape. Setting this up is a major chore. Of course, we can’t use the SLD in Solution Manager since it’s not new enough. Therefore, we need an SLD on PI or Portal or somewhere else. And this SLD out-of-the-box doesn’t have new content. Therefore, we spend an entire day getting new content in there. After we get our systems synced in there from Java and ABAP alike, we’re still not done. Next, we need to sync this data to LMDB (another repository of basically the same data). This can take another whole day. But even now it’s not done. This data needs to be validated. It needs to be synced into the SMSY (another repository of basically the same data, are you noticing a trend?) database with incremental batch jobs. Of course, every one of these steps has problems and requires different SAP notes and manual fixes, and so on. It’s no wonder why people love SaaS like SalesForce.com. Rant over.

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