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Best Practice 10.4 – Validate the design against a set of criteria based on your business requirements - SAP Lens

Best Practice 10.4 – Validate the design against a set of criteria based on your business requirements

Establish a set of criteria based on your business requirements, balancing the risk of failure, impact on the business, and acceptable trade-offs. Use these criteria to validate the design and make adjustments where necessary.

Suggestion 10.4.1 – Assess the cost to your business of an outage

Failures, of either AWS services or SAP components, will impact your SAP system differently depending on the resilience and recovery strategies. The type of failure will determine the duration of the outage (RTO) and the potential data loss (RPO).

For each failure, assess the risk of an outage and the cost to your business. For example, are there revenue generating processes that will be impacted and what is the hourly cost associated with the system not being available?

Suggestion 10.4.2 – Assess the cost of your architecture

In SAP Landscapes, the largest elements of the AWS monthly bill typically are for Amazon EC2 and storage-related services. Understand the cost implications so that you select the best architecture to meet your reliability requirements. Key contributors include:

  • Deployment patterns that don’t maximize hardware utilization

  • Redundant copies of data

  • Operating system license costs

  • Clustering software license costs

  • Costs associated with maintenance, testing, and skilled resources

Refer to [Cost Optimization]: Cost optimization Best Practices for further details.

Suggestion 10.4.3 – Evaluate your design against other pillars in the framework

Reliability cannot be designed in isolation, but should be assessed against the rest of the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Example questions you might ask to evaluate this include:

  • Operational excellence — Do you have the experience and skills to manage the solution?

  • Security — Is your data protected during replication, recovery, etc.

  • Performance — Does replication or the backup activity impact user performance?

  • Cost optimization — Does the cost of the solution align with the assumed risk?

  • Sustainability — Does the solution align with your sustainability and environmental impact initiatives?