SAP on AWS Best Practices

February 13, 2026 | SAP AWS ERP

Certified instances and HANA storage.

SAP on AWS: Best Practices Guide

AWS is a certified infrastructure provider for SAP workloads, including SAP HANA, S/4HANA, Business Suite, and BW/4HANA. Running SAP on AWS requires specific instance types, storage configurations, and operational practices to meet SAP's certification requirements and performance expectations.

Certified Instance Types for SAP HANA

Instance	vCPU	Memory	Use Case
x2idn.16xlarge	64	1 TB	Small HANA
x2idn.24xlarge	96	1.5 TB	Medium HANA
u-6tb1.112xlarge	448	6 TB	Large HANA
u-12tb1.112xlarge	448	12 TB	Enterprise HANA
u-24tb1.112xlarge	448	24 TB	Scale-up HANA

Storage Configuration for HANA

# SAP HANA storage layout on AWS
/hana/data    → io2 Block Express (provisioned IOPS)
/hana/log     → io2 Block Express (low latency, high IOPS)
/hana/shared  → EFS (shared across scale-out nodes)
/usr/sap      → gp3
/backup       → S3 via AWS Backint Agent

SAP requires specific IOPS and throughput minimums for HANA:

/hana/data: 400 MB/s read, 250 MB/s write minimum
/hana/log: 500 MB/s write minimum, <1ms latency

High Availability Architecture

AZ-1:                        AZ-2:
SAP HANA Primary             SAP HANA Secondary
  ↕ System Replication (sync)
SAP App Server (ASCS)        SAP App Server (ERS)
  ↕ Pacemaker Cluster
SAP PAS + Dialog              SAP AAS + Dialog

Use SUSE HAE or Red Hat HA with AWS-specific fencing agents for automatic failover.

AWS Backint Agent for HANA

Direct backup to S3 without staging to local disk:

# /usr/sap/SID/SYS/global/hdb/opt/hdbconfig/aws-backint-agent/aws-backint-agent-config.yaml
aws_region: us-east-1
aws_s3_bucket_name: sap-hana-backups
aws_s3_sse: aws:kms
aws_s3_kms_key_id: arn:aws:kms:...:key/xxx

# Backup speeds: up to 4.8 TB/hour with multipart upload

SAP on AWS Best Practices

Use SAP-certified instances only — Non-certified instances void SAP support
Enable Enhanced Networking — ENA for up to 100 Gbps network performance
Place instances in cluster placement group — Minimize network latency between app and DB tiers
Use Dedicated Hosts for licensing — BYOL for SAP licenses requires Dedicated Hosts
Implement AWS Launch Wizard for SAP — Automated, SAP-validated deployment

Monitoring

AWS for SAP — Native CloudWatch metrics for HANA and NetWeaver
SAP Solution Manager — Application-level monitoring
CloudWatch alarms — CPU, memory, IOPS, network for SAP instances

Cost Optimization

Savings Plans — 1-year or 3-year compute Savings Plans for production SAP
Non-production on smaller instances — Dev/QA don't need production-sized HANA
Stop non-production outside hours — Schedule dev/QA shutdowns
S3 tiering for backups — Move old backups to S3 Glacier automatically

Eazy SaaS Tip: We use AWS Launch Wizard for initial SAP deployment (automated, best-practice configuration) and then customize for specific requirements. This saves 2-3 weeks compared to manual setup and ensures compliance with SAP certification requirements from day one.

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