AWS Lambda vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

Scenarios where AWS Lambda is well suited: 1. When we need to run a periodic task few times in a day or every hour, we may deploy it on AWS Lambda so it would not increase load on our server which is handling client requests and at the same time we don't have to pay for AWS Lambda when it is not running. So, overall we only pay for few function invocations. 2. When some compute intensive processing is to be done but the number of requests per unit of time fluctuates. For example, we had deployed an AWS Lambda for processing images into different sizes and storing them on AWS S3 once user uploads them. Now, this is something that may happen few times every hour on a particular day or may not happen even once on other days. To handle this kind of tasks AWS Lambda is a better choice as we don't have to pay for the idle time of the server and also we don't have to worry about scaling when the load is high. Scenarios where AWS Lambda is not appropriate to use: 1. When we expect a large request volume continuously on the server. 2. When we don't want latency even in case of concurrent requests.

Incentivized

SAP Business Technology Platform offers to run the cloud application without worries about availability and accessibility. This is helping us to enable the services that are really suited for us. For example, We have Cloud Identity Services that offer the capability to manage identity directory and also Identity provisioning functionality. Both functionalities helped us to manage the SSO and also enabled the auto-provisioning.

Incentivized

• AWS Lambda is a welcoming platform, supporting several languages, including Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby. And if you need to deploy a Lambda function in another language, AWS offers a Runtime API for integration.
• We really appreciate how AWS Lambda is always-on for our functions, with only a brief "cold-start" waiting period the first time a function is called after being dormant.
• In addition to only generating costs when it's actually being used, AWS Lambda really puts the "serverless" in serverless architecture, offering turnkey scaleability and high availability for our code with zero effort on our part.

Incentivized

• Authentication options - In the past, we needed to really leverage our own solutions for MFA and other security measures, but now, out-of-the-box these options are really good and readily available.
• Ease of use - the interface has been adjusted to be really easy on the eyes but also simpler, less convoluted, and really well thought out.
• Modernized SAP experience - compared to the old stuff, SAP is really modernizing all of the experiences. The new house style is rejuvenated, and the company is really becoming more likable compared to 10 years ago!
• SAP Discovery and Missions are a real treat to see what the upcoming costs are!

Incentivized

• The UI and Developer experience is not so great. IF you use an abstraction like Serverless Application Model (SAM), things get pretty easy, but it's still AWS UI/DX you're working with after that (which is to say, not their strength).
• Documentation is always a mixed bag. Sometimes it's just easier to google your specific problem and see how others have solved it. This can be much faster than trying to find an example that may or may not be there in the documentation (which oftentimes has multiple versions and revisions).

Incentivized

• The almost mandatory use of HANA services to run CAP applications. It would be best to provide extensive support for other databases.
• The subspace landing page/cockpit is not so user friendly. Provides a lot of information and usually is hard to find where things are.
• Downtimes should be shorter.

Incentivized

Seamless integration with external system and dashboard to monitor the data flow and analysis are very essential for the business. The way the product is designed and modelled lead to minimum business disruptions. Adopting to the new and modern technology was easy. Keeping the central system as clean and adopting project bases development are advantages.

Incentivized

It is very easy to get started with AWS Lambda and create your first function. The user interface makes it easy to add AWS services to be inputs or outputs to the function, meaning it can be configured in many different ways for different needs. This makes it ideal for various scenarios in AWS.

Incentivized

Overall, I feel it is build toward as an SAP centric platform. Which is very proper direction for SAP as it is their competitive advantage. However, as a customer, I like to see the cost of the services to come down with the advance of underlay hardware capabilities. Licensing model can be streamlined for easier budgeting and consumption.

Incentivized

As this is a product where a great part of errors can be at the source code level, AWS support team doesn't dive that further. I mean they don't evaluate problems more complex related to your code, [which] is totally understandable, but this make[s] debug process more tough and painful.

Incentivized

I give it 9/10 because its customer support team is responsive and knowledgeable, providing clear guidance on complex issues. We contacted them several times; I want to give one example. When we had a problem with third-party integration, we reached out to them about the issue, and they provided a tailored solution for this.

Incentivized

Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.

Incentivized

1. Sometimes the licensing doesn’t make sense, e.g., Difficult to understand the license for ABAP cloud runtime. 2. When SAP Business Technology Platform workflow cost is very high but process automation which offers more features has less cost.

Incentivized

It's fine, it works as the others would have, except EC2. We are migrating back to EC2 for dedicated compute because we have scaled to a point where we have consistent traffic. The tradeoff of maintaining infrastructure in-house outweighs the benefits of moving quickly through our roadmap.

Incentivized

SAP Business Technology Platform is easily connectable using standard solutions to the onpremise backend SAP systems. Services can be linked with each other and with SAP systems in a managed and secure way, while with the other products getting the data, access and networking done is cumbersome. Also we can make sure to have all cloud environments in the same region using the multi cloud approach wich reduces latency problems.

Incentivized

• We have simplified log fiie ingestion using Lambda functions. The return has been less time worrying about getting logs from source to ingestion; one the process is in place the team is nearly 100% hands off.
• We have begun taking a more API focused approach by using API Gateway as the interface to business processes and Lambda as the back end compute. Moving away from server based back ends places us on a path to reducing overall spend in compute costs.
• Lambda functions allow us to easily interface with third party services through APIs. This simplifies access management since the function can be granted permissions and access to the function can be gated with API keys and other authentication methods.

Incentivized

• Spending time to develop the application idea and visualize first before jumping to SAP Business Technology Platform and initiate development
• Take the time to test and validate architecture and data flows for the potential application or process to be developed on SAP Business Technology Platform
• Conduct regular assessment of usability, effectiveness of process turnover

Incentivized