About me
Welcome! It’s a first of a series of articles related to running SAP workloads on Google Cloud Platform. Let me introduce myself and provide a very high-level plan of what I plan to publish here.
My name is Maciej Zachariasz (here you will find my LinkedIn profile) and I’m a technology passionate, a husband, father and amateur endurance sports athlete in my mid thirties. I have roughly 13 years of experience in IT, with around 10 years in SAP Basis area. I’ve started from being a database admin (Oracle, MS SQL), then I deep dived into OSes (Linux, UNIX), storage and backup solutions. Afterwards, I used this experience to build SAP Basis skills. My focus are mainly system installations, migrations, system copies, configuration, add-ons management and problem-solving. I was a technical leader for few European SAP-related projects in different business areas, ranging from Energy to Healthcare. I’ve been working for different customers, most of which are global, well-known organizations for which SAP systems are crucial for the sole existence of their business. Since late 2018, I started my adventure with public cloud, namely: Google Cloud Platform. Since then, I became a Google Certified Professional – both as an architect and a data engineer. Currently, I’m a SAP Cloud Architect, supporting various customers who decide to migrate on-prem SAP systems to GCP.
I am also an authorized Google Cloud Platform Trainer.
At some point, I decided to to combine my SAP experience with GCP knowledge, which resulted in the creation of my proprietary tool called “SAP on GCP“.
SAP on GCP
That’s a custom-made solution that I have been developing, firstly as a proof of concept for running SAP in GCP. As of early 2020, it is able to perform quick (~35 mins), automated installation of distributed SAP NetWeaver-based system on Google Cloud Platform, which can be used as a sandbox or a POC environment.
It uses Terraform to provision all cloud resources needed and then it switches to Ansible runbooks which are responsible for configuration tasks and unattended installation of a SAP Netweaver-based system. I will provide much more details in the upcoming blog posts, but if you’d like to see the tool in action already, feel free to watch this video.
What’s coming?
In the series of articles that will follow (I plan to publish at least once a week), I will walk you through a series of topics that are essential for running SAP workloads on Google Cloud Platform. I will start by explaining some basic GCP resources that are needed for a cloud-based SAP system, both NetWeaver and S/4 based. I will do a high-level comparison of GCP with its competitors and explain if and why the public cloud is suitable for SAP. I will provide some arguments that make Google a SAP-compliant cloud provider and I will do a deep dive into security topics, which are crucial for enterprise-level apps like SAP. I will also take a look at a reference SAP architectures on GCP and give you lots of guidelines about how to install NetWeaver system on GCP by yourself. Then, I shall present many aspects of automating this task and explain how I implemented them in my custom solution “SAP on GCP“. I do not plan to deep dive into each and every step nor will I give a complete, step-by-step procedure. Instead, I will start from a high-level view and slowly dive deeper in the weeks to follow. I will probably stick with playground/lab type of SAP system throughout the series of articles, but I will surely introduce some concepts of productive / highly available / scale-out environments. Some of the concepts are a little bit different for such type of workloads and if you’re interested in details, feel free to contact me directly.
If you’re interested in the topics I plan to explain, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter, share the articles with anyone who might be interested and don’t forget to leave a comment below!