Design and Implementation of a SAP HANA Cloud Configuration Handler

worked on by: Cora Glaß

Outline

Motivation

Not long ago, SAP released its new product the SAP HANA Cloud. In general, SAP HANA is an in-memory database management system that provides its users with fast access, querying and processing. SAP HANA Cloud is SAP's highly scalable cloud solution of SAP HANA and is currently available on AWS and Microsoft Azure. In the following, a system describes the infrastructure on which the SAP HANA Cloud instances (in the following called: HANA instance or instance) are running on. A HANA instance provides the user with many configuration parameters that can be set to satisfy the needs of many customers having different requirements. The user and customer can be the same person. When operating a system with a lot of such highly configurable instances, it is necessary to maintain a general overview on how each instance or group of instances is configured. For example, the configuration of a HANA instance could be changed as a temporary workaround for a bug. Usually a bug would affect multiple HANA instances. Therefore, a group of multiple instances would have to be configured. In this case, we must know which instances belong to this group to be able to execute a roll back of their configurations after the bug was fixed. If the total amount of instances is rather low, they can be managed manually. This also means, a subset of employees must be responsible for the configurations and have to access a productive system. This does introduce the possibility of human errors as well as workload that could have been decreased or replaced by automation. An increasing amount of instances leads to the situation that the configuration handling gets more and more time-consuming and demands a continuous effort as e.g. maintaining an overview of all instances gets more complex. To reduce such manual workload, it can be efficient to use the site reliability engineering (SRE) approach of automating ops related work in form of e.g. a service.

Goal

The goal of my bachelor thesis is to improve the configuration handling of HANA instances by introducing the following functionalities in form of a single service: Secure configuration of instances without accessing the system manually, configuration of multiple instances via one request, on demand generation of a configuration state overview of all HANA instances, creation and application of configuration profiles that contain information of parameters and the value they should get set to.

Thesis Requirements

formulate requirements here (together with your adviser)

Milestones and Planning

A milestone is a scheduled event signifying the completion of a major deliverable or a set of related deliverables. A milestone has zero duration and no effort -- there is no work associated with a milestone. It is a flag in the workplan to signify some other work has completed. Usually a milestone is used as a project checkpoint to validate how the project is progressing and revalidate work. (Source: http://www.mariosalexandrou.com/definition/milestone.asp)

Milestone no. Past days CW Goals target accomplished wrench
1 DONE 1 CWXX Goals accomplished

Weekly Status

Week - (CW 25)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week - (CW 26)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week - (CW 27)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week - (CW 28)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week - (CW 29)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week 1 (CW 30)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week 2 (CW 31)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week 3 (CW 32)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week 4 (CW 33)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week 5 (CW 34)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week 6 (CW 35)

Activities

Results

Next Steps

Problems

Week 7 (CW 36)

Activities

From this point onward I will concentrate on writing the thesis. Therefore, the weekly updates are rather short.

Week 8 (CW 37)

Writing the thesis.

Week 9 (CW 38)

on sick leave

Week 10 (CW 39)

This week I worked on the following sections of my bachelor thesis:

Week 11 (CW 40)

Finishing the first draft.

Week 12 (CW 41)

This week will be used to let people proofread the thesis and to improve it based on their feedback.