Introducing the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP

Introduction

Thousands of AWS customers across nearly every industry trust AWS to run and operate their mission-critical SAP workloads. Increasingly, customers have told us that while they value the ability to run their SAP applications with better performance, scalability, and security on AWS, they also want an easier way to modernize and transform their business processes within SAP. While many AWS customers including Moderna, Zalando, and Invista have successfully innovated around their SAP-based business processes using AWS services, this has traditionally required a lot of heavy lifting. We often see customers having to create and maintain many point-to-point connections, integrate SAP and AWS security models, and map data formats, which can sometimes lead to a thousand or more lines of code for each AWS service invoked.
Today, we are pleased to announce that the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP is now available in preview. The AWS SDK for SAP ABAP makes it easy for ABAP developers to modernize and transform SAP-based business processes by connecting to AWS services directly using the SAP ABAP language they know and love. This approach allows customers to innovate around their business processes without increasing architectural complexity or requiring ABAP developers to try to figure out all the ins and outs of coding against AWS service APIs. They only need to use a few lines of code to directly access all 200+ AWS services.
In today’s blog, I’d like to explain some of the key features of the SDK, walk through some example use cases, and close by showing you how to get started.

Key Features

We built the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP based on our customers’ long-standing desire to easily innovate with AWS services and SAP together. But we also worked backwards from very specific needs that customers have brought to us to ensure the SDK could be seamlessly integrated into their existing workflows without requiring a heavy lift from either their IT teams or their ABAP developers. Let’s go over a few of those.

Agentless

The AWS SDK for SAP ABAP is purely based on SAP ABAP in an AWS namespace, enabling simple deployment and maintenance. There are no agents to install or maintain.

Compatible with a broad variety of SAP applications

The AWS SDK for SAP ABAP supports SAP NetWeaver ABAP version 7.4 and above. This includes SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP ERP 6.0 EHP 7, SAP BW 7.4, SAP Solution Manager 7.2, and many more.

Familiar user experience for ABAP Developers

The code package uses familiar ABAP syntax, and is imported and patched with transports, like any other ABAP code.

Integrated security

You can maintain end-to-end, role-based security by simply mapping your SAP and AWS IAM roles in accordance with your security policies. Authentication, mapping users to IAM roles, and assumption of the IAM roles are all taken care of by the SDK.

Configurable

Using ABAP configuration tables, customers can avoid hardcoding resources, settings, and roles in their ABAP code. Of course, this configuration is transportable according to standard SAP software logistics practices.

Now let’s transition to some of the things you can actually do with the SDK and get you off to building!

Example Use Cases

To better serve their customers, take advantage of new opportunities, and react to unexpected challenges often requires customers to change business processes that run in SAP. For many, the complexity of making those changes has even encouraged them to maintain the status quo. We believe that the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP is going to unlock many of those scenarios by dramatically reducing the complexity needed to use AWS services as part of the business process. Let’s briefly talk about a few examples we’ve heard from customers.

Invoice generation / processing

For so many customers, generating and processing invoices is an arduous manual process. For example, one customer in the apparel industry has told us that they manually consolidate and upload invoices to SAP on a nightly basis, then leverage a custom program to access them from the local file system, after which they are processed on the SAP Application Server. This manual process is error-prone, creates dependencies between SAP and systems administration teams, and requires manual monitoring of both the storage and various touchpoints within the application layers.

With the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, they will be able to leverage Amazon S3 as a secure file store for the invoices. Then, they can process the invoices directly within the S3 bucket and have the associated information available to business users directly in the SAP application. Those users will no longer need to sign into the S3 bucket.

Address correction

Many business processes still rely on manually inputting addresses of internal stakeholders and business partners—leading to the potential for errors and associated delays in product shipments, receipt of invoices, etc. With the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, customers can push SAP documents to Amazon Location Service, which will automatically identify errors by checking against known addresses and correcting the addresses accordingly.

Language translation

Most of our customers run international or global businesses with multi-lingual workforces. Previously, translating work orders and other critical business documents from SAP across multiple languages has not been possible. With the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, customers will be able to push documents to Amazon Translate to be perform language localization and natural language processing (NLP)-based text analytics.

Check out the Getting Started Guide for a step-by-step walk through of this use case.

While it’s a pretty simple example, you can see how with not more than a couple dozen lines of code you can leverage some pretty powerful AWS services directly from within SAP.

Getting Started

To get started with the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, visit our Getting Started Guide. Shortly after filling out the form, you will receive an email confirming whether or not we are able to onboard you, and next steps. You’ll also find links to product documentation, the API Reference Guide, and Code Examples to get you started.

See us in-person at AWS re:Invent

If you’re heading to AWS re:Invent, I highly recommend you register for ENT235: Accelerate Business Process Innovation with the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP. We’ll be walking through key features of the SDK, diving deep on the developer experience, and even demonstrating some of the aforementioned use cases in real time. If you’re not already registered, you can register here—then head to the session catalog and reserve your seat. We’ll have tons of other valuable SAP content at re:Invent, too—check out our SAP on AWS at re:Invent 2022 blog to learn more.

To learn why thousands of customers trust AWS to run their mission-critical SAP workloads, visit the SAP on AWS Page.