Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - How Adobe modernized their billing APIs with SAP on AWS (ENT326)

Summary

Adobe faced challenges with their on-prem application deployment and sought to modernize their billing APIs with SAP on AWS.
The Universal Billing Solution (UBS) project aimed to address performance, integration, and availability issues.
Adobe transitioned from a traditional CD shipping model to a SaaS architecture, requiring a fundamental shift in their business processes.
The legacy SAP systems were not designed for the scale and availability required by Adobe's new SaaS model.
Adobe's approach involved leveraging existing investments and creating a hybrid architecture that combined microservices with SAP.
The modernization led to significant improvements in API response times (from 1.5 seconds to under 100 milliseconds) and system availability (from 3 nines to 4 nines).
Adobe's future plans include completing the migration to the new billing system before transitioning to S/4HANA in 2024.
The session also covered AWS's support for SAP workloads, including new instance types, automation capabilities, and the well-architected framework.

Adobe's decision to modernize their billing system was driven by the need to support a SaaS business model with high availability and performance.
The company chose to build on their existing SAP investments rather than starting from scratch, which allowed them to maintain real-time financial reporting.
Adobe's modernization project was completed using in-house resources, showcasing their engineering capabilities.
The project's success was partly due to a focus on upskilling existing staff and integrating new talent with cloud and Java skill sets.
Adobe's approach to the modernization included creating a facade to abstract billing complexity and decouple billing from financial data.
The modernization has set the stage for Adobe's future transition to S/4HANA, with the new architecture designed to be flexible and accommodate changes in SAP's table structures and processes.
AWS's continuous innovation in supporting SAP workloads, including the release of new instance types and the ABAP SDK for AWS, demonstrates their commitment to providing a robust platform for enterprise applications.
The well-architected framework, particularly the reliability pillar, played a significant role in ensuring the success of Adobe's modernization project on AWS.