Monthly SAP on Azure News from the Podcast

[hobru]

In over 30 episodes my colleagues roboban, goran-condric  and I have been recording weekly shows of the Unofficial SAP on Azure Video Podcast.



It started as a discussion round between 3 Ex-SAPlers now working at Microsoft, but has evolved in a weekly deep dive on one topic that touches the world in between SAP and Microsoft [to use a quote from christian.lechner fantastic myNewsWrap- YouTube)]. Each episode starts with a look back at the current week and then we talk to an expert about something that is -- hopefully -- intersting for customers running both SAP and Microsoft.

It turns out while we do have a growing community for these podcasts (they are also available as audio-only via Unofficial SAP on Azure podcast • A podcast on Anchor) there are still quite a few customer & partners that have not yet heard about it. So a colleauge recommend that I should also use a SAP Community blog-post to write a summary on what we are covering.

 

So here we go 🙂

First the basics:

You can find the Podcast on the SAP on Azure YouTube Channel, https://youtube.com/SAPonAzure. For each episode we also have an entry in GitHub which has all the links shown in an episode and also has the slides (if any were shown) for easy usage: https://github.com/hobru/SAPonAzure

 

But what do we talk about?

As mentioned we have now over 30 episodes, so quite a lot of content has been created. You can find an overview of all the episodes here, SAPonAzure/TOC.md at master · hobru/SAPonAzure · GitHub The links in this table jump right to the topic-deep dive -- so you can skip the intro and (at that time) news of the week.

We have a lot of content about just running SAP on Azure. Obviously Microsoft IT running SAP is the perfect example of "Eating your own dogfood" and Hans Reutter explains this in a fantastic way. But we also talked about Cost Management, Global Deployments, Monitoring and much more.

Architecture topics (like Availability Zones) or High-Availability (with Azure Shared Disks) and Storage (like Azure NetApp Files) were topics that we talked about.

Personally I am also a big fan of integration topics where we also already covered a lot of ground talking about Logic Apps, The Power Platorm, DevOps and obviously "everything" related to Single Sign-On.

For all these topics we had experts across the world joining and explaining these topics in detail. I am sure you can also find something useful there.

What did we recently talk about?

So now that we have April, I want to take a look back at March and highlight some episodes and content that we talked about.

Episode #31 - The One with Principle Propagation (Martin Raepple)

We started in March with the one and only martin.raepple who has created a blog post series around Principal Propagation. So far there are three parts and if you have not done so, I can highly recommend to check them out:

• Principal propagation in a multi-cloud solution between Microsoft Azure and SAP Cloud Platform (SCP)...


• Principal propagation in a multi-cloud solution between Microsoft Azure and SAP Cloud Platform (SCP)...


• Principal propagation in a multi-cloud solution between Microsoft Azure and SAP Cloud Platform (SCP)...

So in Episode #31 Martin joined us and showed how you can setup and use Single Sign-On directly from Teams to your SAP system on-prem using Cloud Platform Integration and the Cloud Connector.



 

Episode #32 - The One with Azure Monitor for SAP solutions (Ramakrishna Ramadurgam)

One week later Ramakrishna Ramadurgam joined us to talk about the Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions (AMS) and the new provider for SAP NetWeaver which allows you to monitor not only standard Azure "infrastructure components" like CPU Utiliization, Memory, Network-Traffic, ... but also peek inside your SAP system and use these insights to trigger related actions.



 

Episode #33 - The One with Azure Runbooks (Goran Condric & Robert Biro)

One of the benefits of running your SAP system in the Cloud is the flexibility you get managing your infrastructure. You can easily scale-up or down, and can also shut down your systems to save money. At Microsoft we have a lot of landscapes (Development, QA, Performance Tests, ...) that are "snoozed by default" which means we only start them if we really need them.

Similar our Azure Fast Track team has landscapes that they are using for test and demos. Obviously these landscapes don't need to run 24x7. So goran-condric and bobbiromsft worked together to create Azure runbooks which can easily start and stop SAP landscapes. But it goes much further: when stopping your SAP landscape you can even configure that the attached storage disks should be migrated to a cheaper (not as performant) version. Only once you start the system, does it switch automatically back to the better storage. By this you can save even more money while the systems are not running.



 

Episode #34 - The One with Power Apps managing your SAP System (Martin Pankraz)

Everyone is talking about Low-Code / No-Code right now. There are a lot of tools out there that enable business users to create apps (Low-Code/No-Code Development and Citizen Automation | SAP News). With the Azure runbooks that Goran and Robert had created all that was missing now was an app to enable users to start and stop the SAP system in an easy way from their mobile device or browser. That's where martin-pankraz came in and created a simple, yet very powerfull Power App to control and execute the runbooks. Now colleagues can start their SAP systems when required, stop it when done and even schedule and request the usage of a demo system. It's an amazing use-case that shows how native Azure services can be combined with low-code solutions from the Power Platform.

The best thing: Martin has published a great blog-post on this (Hey, SAP Systems! My PowerApp says Snooze! But only if you’re ready yet | SAP Blogs) and even made all the required apps & tools available on GitHub (SAP-on-Azure-Scripts-and-Utilities/Start-Stop-Automation at main · Azure/SAP-on-Azure-Scripts-and-Ut...).



 

That's it for this month! See you next month!