PA SaaS in AWS

Planning Analytics as a service in AWS has been one of the most awaited announcements for Enterprise Performance Management practitioners. There is a lot of demand for fast performance, high availability, horizontal scalability and flexibility for planning, budgeting, and forecasting across the performance management technologies. PA as SaaS in AWS is a natural fit for enterprise leading software on public cloud. I was able to get my hands-on and there are some interesting features.

Service Quota & Administration

The provisioned instance looks like below. This is similar to current PA offering but with a little difference in the Administration tab.

The provisioned environment has Service Instance Quota, which in total is 64Gb RAM, 500 Gb Disk space and 50 users. The service quota will be utilised by Tm1 databases.

In the environments tab, we can create new environments which is a new feature. The service quota is global to all the environments provisioned; however, users can be individually configured across environments. The concept of primary environment in PA cloud where all the users should be configured is not required in AWS SaaS. Each environment can have its unique users and groups.

High Availability

There have always been some edge cases in TM1 where we would like to have high availability of Tm1 databases during a financial planning cycle. This is now possible with SaaS offering in AWS. When we navigate to the database tab from administration, we can manage the existing TM1 database for high Availability with the manage button.

This option for high availability where I have created 1 replica gives the opportunity for scaling and the traffic is internally managed between the replicas. More importantly, this update is seamless to the end users and there is no downtime. So, during high usage (planning cycle) a particular database can be made highly available (also scaled down during off cycles) without downtime. Furthermore, if we see in the screenshot, the disk space and memory can also be updated ad hoc based on the requirements.

If you would like to know more about Planning Analytics as Service, check the documentation here.

The link has interesting facts to know if you are an existing or new customer of PA.