Hyerscalers – A comparison for running your SAP workloads in the public cloud

When we talk about comparing cloud service pricing, it can be difficult to draw direct comparisons. That's because each offering provides different service and pricing models. Coupled with just trying to find pricing for your specific needs on each provider's site gets complicated. Depending on where you look, who you ask, and if you already have a footprint with a hyperscaler will all lead to different rates. And that's just list price. We haven't even begun to consider negotiated rates.  

It's important to start with a few commonalities across all hyperscaler options:

Scalability – Arguably, the most significant draw: the ability to flex your infrastructure up and down based on your immediate needs. Scaling infrastructure temporarily or only as your business grows can help control infrastructure costs more tightly. The other side of the coin: if left unmonitored, it can be costlier. All hyperscalers offer auto-scaling in both scale-up and scale-out capabilities.

Pay-as-you-go model - Pay for what you need when you need it, that's the idea behind the hyperscaler's Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model. This can be attractive to organizations. This also may financially benefit an organization because it allows infrastructure to move from a CapEx to OpEx.

Certified by SAP – depending on which SAP product or application you want to run, you may want to check into specific certifications to run that SAP application, SAP HANA, and SAP Cloud Platform (Paas). Not all SAP products are certified on all hyperscalers. There are restrictions on not just SAP products, but on things like size of certified workloads too.

Flexible pricing models. This is a major draw for the hyperscalers. All offer different ways to pay for your consumption and needs. This takes the form of Pay-As-You-Go models where you're billed for usage, usually by per-second. Much like how you're billed for your home's water or electrical use.  

Discounts. All hyperscalers offer discounts. While this is a positive, it also makes it much harder to compare pricing between any two hyperscalers. While list-price information is publically available on all their sites, what you see is never what you truly end up paying. Every hyperscaler is competing for your business, so they offer all sorts of discounts: usage, commitment, volume, etc.  

Network Connectivity and Speed – All hyperscalers deliver strong connections with worldwide networks at fast speeds. The difference between any of these is relatively negligible. One thing to pay close attention to is how and where data is stored and moved. Hyperscalers have different pricing models on how they charge for speed, location, amount of data transferred, etc.  

They all tout a reduced Total Cost of Ownership. A lower TCO is achievable but not necessarily because of a particular hyperscaler or their product to offering. Instead, it is dependent on you, the customer using sound policies in leveraging the options to help reduce those costs. So don't get caught up in the sales and marketing of any particular provider. It's always up to you to control your costs.

A trusted Partner – The hyperscalers all provide the platform to run your SAP environment; what they don't provide internally is their services to migrate you to their platform. You still need to rely on trusted partners to plan and execute your move to the cloud. After you've moved, you and your trusted SI will be responsible for managing that SAP environment. Not the hyperscaler.  

BYOS/BYOL model – all the hyperscalers provide most of their SAP solutions on a Bring Your Own Software and Bring Your Own License model. The exceptions to this might be on-demand or free trials. But if you plan to run SAP in a hyperscalers, they only provide the reliable, scalable infrastructure platform and nothing else.

Hybrid Architecture – While this might not be the hyperscalers preferred method of deploying SAP systems, it's worth noting that many SAP customers using a cloud hyperscaler are actually using a hybrid SAP environment, meaning the host SAP systems are in both on-premise and cloud. This is one common way SAP customers are able to reduce their SAP hosting costs. Examples include running their PRD system on-premise but spinning up POCs, training, and DEV landscapes in the cloud. Systems that might be temporary and can be shut down to save costs benefit the most from the hyperscaler model.

Regionality/Availability Zones – All hyperscalers offer their infrastructure in various regions or availability zones around the globe.  From a DR/HA perspective, this might be an important point to understand. It's not just where a hyperscaler offers these zones, but rather where specifically your workloads will reside. Governments, regulatory agencies, natural disasters, etc., can all shape where you may need your data and workloads. Aligning these needs with the availability and cost of each hyperscaler's zone options is essential to consider.  

Microsoft Azure (Azure) In January 2021, an SAP and Microsoft announcement called for extended expansion of their cloud partnership to automate migration and operation of S/4HANA on Azure and integrate Microsoft Teams across SAP solutions. This is yet another step in SAP and Microsoft's growing partnership to sway customers to Azure.  

Currently, Azure has SAP certifications and the industry's most scalable public cloud infrastructure, offering anywhere between 192GB and 12TB HANA certified virtual machines.  

Much like the other cloud offerings, the benefits of built-in monitoring, security, DR/HA, scalability, etc., are all there. Azure has solid automation and DevOps for the deployment of instances. They're also heavily integrated into tools by SUSE, Terraform, Ansible, etc.  

When it comes to migration, Azure has the most robust path and tools to help SAP customers get over to their solution. That could be because they've been at it the longest, and they arguably have the strongest relationship with SAP. Azure has also put its money where its mouth is by running SAP for its finance, HR, and Supply Chain systems for almost 25 years AND migrating them all to their Azure platform. Which at the time was the largest SAP migration to a hyperscaler. Finally, Azure has built-in analytical tools, which you can use in integration with or potentially as a replacement to your SAP analytic tools.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) AWS has the longest history running SAP. In 2008 AWS became the first cloud to run SAP workloads. They have also been working with SAP the longest, which has helped them create the broadest selection of SAP-certified, cloud-native instance types. This means more flexibility for the SAP customer.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is AWS' variety of different instance types for an SAP customer to choose which best fits their SAP needs. They comprise of varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. Some environments can provide both HANA scale-up and scale-out capabilities. A big thing to note is that while Amazon offers a wide variety of EC2 instance types for your SAP environment, you MUST run a production environment on an SAP-certified Amazon EC2 instance. You can run non-production on any EC2 instance. So be sure there is a certified instance for your production needs.

Speaking of production vs. non-production in AWS, AWS offers hybrid architecture for customers that may not want to put their entire SAP workload in the cloud. There are three basic options with AWS.

• Running SAP test/trial/training/POC systems in AWS
• Running DEV or QAS landscape on AWS, integrating with an on-premise PRD environment.
• Deploying a new SAP application on AWS to be integrated with existing on-premise SAP environments.  

Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) – AWS's solution package that combines best practices, expertise, tools, financial incentives, and their partner ecosystem to help get SAP customers migrated is available and useful to help SAP customers.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – Admittedly, GCP has been the 3rd wheel in the SAP hyperscaler game the last few years. But recently, GCP has been heavily investing in exceptional talent and go-to-market strategy to compete toe-to-toe with the other hyperscalers in the SAP market.  

GCP has a prepackaged SAP solution called SAP on Google Cloud. It included an environment based on 

• High availability
• Migration strategies
• Backup strategies and solutions
• Disaster recovery strategies

A differentiator seems to be the ability to select customer machine types, allowing you to choose precisely how much vCPU and memory you need. Other vendors typically have predefined instance types. GCP has arguably the fastest instance startup time too. 

Another way GCP tries to save you money is something called Preemptible VM (pVM) instances, which are ideal for stateless, batch job, and fault-tolerant processing workloads. These pVMs are heavily discounted compared to regular pricing.

One thing I like about SAP on Google Cloud is their focus on the migration strategy, where they devote a lot of energy to helping customers categorize and roadmap their four strategies known as:

• Move (homogenous migration) where you move an application to the cloud but make no changes to the application or the underlying database
• Migrate (heterogeneous migration) where you change the OS, the database, or both as part of the migration.
• Transform where you might change the underlying operations system and database but also make significant changes to the application
• Reimplement where you reimplement the application from scratch and migrate only relevant data from your source system to the target system.

GCP also has a focus on integration to their other toolsets to enhance your SAP experience. For example, using HANA in conjunction with BigQuery, you can handle hot, warm, and cold data tiers to reduce your HANA footprint. This is accomplished by moving infrequently accessed HANA OLAP data from in-memory to BigQuery's data warehouse. Another example might be HANA data integration with Tableaus, Data Studio, or even Google Analytics 360 for predictive analysis and insight into your customer.

Security with Google Cloud might be the top in its field too. It is not just because of its vast 15 years of experience keeping customers safe and encrypting everything at no cost, but they also offer a no-charge Business Associate Agreement (BAA) required for HIPPA compliance, which is especially compelling to healthcare clients.

Alibaba Cloud – Alibaba Cloud is not often talked about in North America, especially for running SAP. One recent survey found that Alibaba Cloud has only a 0.01% market share of the cloud market (https://enlyft.com/tech/cloud-platforms-services). However, they're already an established presence in China and have robust capabilities already built out to compete with the other three. Here are some of Alibaba Clouds keys to note:

Pay-As-You-Go pricing model down to the second.

On-month prepaid subscription model available

On average, Alibaba will be cheaper initially than the other hyperscalers. Still, it can quickly become more expensive the longer you use it if left unchecked and don't' implement sound control policies.

When it comes to S/4HANA, Alibaba Cloud deploys a standard solution. At a high level, this solution appears to be a standard infrastructure architecture to host your S/4 with flexible billing models to choose from Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription as well as High Availability across all their service regions and in several different service layers. Finally, Alibaba Cloud has some exclusive SAP-Specific solutions like an SAP systems monitoring tool, a HANA cloud backup, and other integrations to connect your SAP applications to your other services running on Alibaba Cloud.

The main point is that all hyperscalers are incredibly similar. You need to understand your specific SAP needs and look deep under the covers at each hyperscaler. Only then will you be able to flush out which provider will work best for your situation.