From Amazon Echo to SAP HANA on AWS

By 
Frank Stienhans
Technology

Voice powered SAP HANA Cloud Service

By 
Frank Stienhans
, posted on
, posted 
June 3, 2016

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

asdsadsadn sldjflsdjf

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Idea and Reality: Amazon Echo and its cloud part Alexa are exciting

The idea of provisioning of SAP HANA on AWS triggered via an Echo device is probably as old as Echo is.

It is possible for an AWS Solution Architect to launch a Cloud Formation Stack producing a SAP HANA System and therefore to write an Amazon Lambda function to perform such a call for Amazon Alexa.

The resulting experience though is an unmanaged System, which will not reach the optimum in any of the categories:

  • AWS Cost Efficiency
  • Security
  • High Availability
  • Elasticity and Scalability
  • Operations Effort

An unmanaged HANA System is basically a number of EC2 instances with HANA on it, ignoring most events affecting  AWS, AWS Configurations, OS or SAP HANA itself.

Amazon Echo, Ocean9 and SAP HANA 

With Ocean9, the idea of sitting with a cup of coffee and asking Echo to provision a high end SAP production system makes more sense.

 

AWS Architecture for SAP HANA Systems in production

The result is a managed cluster in the example with 4 HANA Hosts for each of the 3 HANA Sites in 3 different AWS availability zones. They are connected using SAP HANA synchronous System Replication.

Ocean9 Architecture for SAP HANA Production Systems on AWS

End to End Flow

Here is the basic architecture of the end to end flow from Echo to SAP HANA. It is interesting that all elements of the processing chain run on AWS and they do so on separate AWS accounts for maximum isolation. (Remark: I Do not know this for sure with regards to Alexa Services vs. Alexa Skills.)

Flow from Amazon Echo to SAP HANA on AWS

When I first started testing the voice recognition of Echo + Alexa last year, I was impressed by the accuracy of the voice recognition. Neither Dragon, Siri nor Google Now were able to recognize my German accent flavored English. Alexa on the other hand had a solid success rate from 15 meters away.

Even the best service can get better. I noticed this week that the voice recognition of my own custom Alexa Skills appears to have drastically improved. Also challenging aspects such as recognizing the uptime percentage have a 100% hit rate.

The Ocean9 difference

Without Ocean9 the effort of creating such a high end SAP deployment is months for enterprises that I have worked with. At Ocean9 we are counting minutes for any operation.

The goal of Ocean9 is to bring simplicity to customers and partners of SAP on AWS. Integrating Ocean9 into your flows leads to simple and powerful user experiences.

Back to top