Authors: Steven Jones (AWS), Sonja Liénard (SAP)
The key to SAP’s innovation and adoption success has always been its openness, supporting diverse hardware platforms, networks, and technology ecosystems, while offering flexible deployment options for customers operating in mixed and heterogeneous environments. This principle extends to the ABAP Platform and especially the BTP ABAP Environment, which powers next-generation ABAP Cloud applications and extensions. Beyond this openness, SAP is leveraging innovative technologies like AWS's ARM-based Graviton processors. Today, we are excited to announce the evolution of that partnership:
SAP and AWS will collaborate to bring the SAP BTP ABAP environment to ARM-based AWS Graviton processors.
A Longstanding History of Co-Innovation in the Cloud
Since 2008, SAP partnered with AWS to help customers leverage cloud innovations. In 2023, we announced that SAP HANA Cloud runs on AWS Graviton, a custom-built chip by AWS that delivers price, performance, and energy efficiency benefits for cloud workloads. By initially migrating SAP HANA Cloud to AWS Graviton3-based Amazon EC2 instances, SAP has seen up to 30% better compute performance for analytical workloads and lowered its compute carbon footprint by an estimated 45%. Building on these experiences, SAP and AWS have been continuously innovating to further improve the performance of SAP HANA Cloud.
Driving Flexibility and Performance
SAP BTP ABAP environment is the platform as a service offering for ABAP developers. It’s a cloud-optimized ABAP platform based on SAP HANA Cloud that serves as a development and runtime environment for cloud applications.
Initial tests have shown positive results for ABAP on AWS Graviton architectures, demonstrating strong performance and efficiency gains. With the extensive breadth of Amazon EC2 instance families available on ARM, SAP will be able to select the right instance type and size optimized for ABAP workloads and leverage this diverse portfolio for maximum instance flexibility for our customers.
Why ARM and AWS Graviton?
With AWS Graviton3-based instances, SAP experienced up to 35% price-performance improvement for analytics workloads, and a reduction of the compute carbon footprint of SAP HANA Cloud workloads. With AWS Graviton4-based instances, we’ve seen an up to 25% additional performance improvement for analytical and up to 40% additional improvement for transactional workloads compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances.
Now, with the next AWS Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g instances, we’ve observed a 35-60% increase in the performance of our OLTP queries on SAP HANA Cloud in a single generation. Based on the performance improvements demonstrated in SAP HANA Cloud with AWS Graviton processors, SAP is confident the SAP BTP ABAP environment will also leverage AWS Graviton technology to deliver similar benefits.
A Strategic Partnership for Sustainability
This new collaboration continues our shared commitment to sustainability. SAP is a signatory of Amazon’s Climate Pledge and has accelerated its own sustainability commitment to 2030. Our journey with AWS Graviton aligns perfectly with those goals, and we are eager to see what additional improvements in energy efficiency we can realize together in the future.
What’s Next?
Porting the SAP BTP ABAP environment to AWS Graviton involves adapting its cloud-native architecture, including containerized services and runtime components, to ARM. SAP and AWS teams will continue developing, testing, and working on performance optimization pipelines to ensure a seamless experience for customers.
We look forward to sharing more updates on this project and the value it brings in terms of performance, reliability, and sustainability. Stay tuned as we continue this journey together.
Bluesky
