If you’re a green-field or brown-field SAP customer and you will be deploying on-premise, you may well have a capability requirement to deploy Adobe Document Services for your SAP estate.
This is usually the case if you will be creating professional PDF documents, for example, for invoicing or payslips.
If you do have this requirement, then you need to be aware of the up & coming end of mainstream maintenance for SAP Netweaver AS Java 7.50.
You see, normally, the end of mainstream maintenance of SAP Netweaver based products is no big deal, you can always pay the extra cost for an extension to your maintenance agreement. This is quite nicely titled “Extended Maintenance”. Neat.
However, like the sub-title to a never ending action movie trilogy, “this time it’s different.”
SAP have definitively stated in SAP note 1648480 that there will be no extended maintenance for Netweaver AS Java 7.50!
“Application Server Java within SAP NetWeaver 7.50 will be supported in mainstream maintenance to end of 2024. Extended maintenance will not be offered.“
The SAP product availability matrix (PAM) and also SAP note 1648480 both state that Netweaver AS Java 7.50 is supported until 31 December 2024.
But why is this different to SAP Netweaver AS ABAP you may be asking?
It comes down to the third-party technology within the Java stack and the mismatch of available support cycles from the third-party vendors in accordance with SAP’s support cycles.
This is noted in the SAP note previously mentioned.
Although there is no detail in the SAP note, it does make sense if you know that SAP take updates for the SAP JVM from Oracle (the custodians of Java).
As we know from my previous article, the Oracle JVM 8 is being sunset, which could be causing a bit of a headache (cost) for SAP since the Oracle JVM 8 technology is incorporated into SAP JVM 8.
The SAP JVM 8 is the underpinning of Netweaver AS Java 7.50.
Coincidence? Maybe. But also remember from my article that Oracle are very kindly providing a paid-for subscription service for updates to JVM 8.
I guess SAP will be one of those customers.
So what are your options now you’re aware of the NW AS Java 7.50 end of maintenance?
There are currently no options available for deploying Adobe Document Services within an SAP Netweaver AS Java instance!
But, there is the possibility that you can use the new SAP Cloud Platform Forms by Adobe SaaS offering from SAP.
Quite simply, you pay per PDF.
In the short-term you may well decide to stick to the tried and tested method of deploying ADS in NW AS Java 7.50.
Just consider the overheads that this may induce and compare it to the SaaS option “SAP Cloud Platform Forms by Adobe”.
Examples of overheads:
– How many ADS instances you run: maybe 2x PRD (with HA/DR), 2x Pre-PRD (with HA/DR), 1x TST, 1x DEV, 1x SBX ??
– Cost of SAP Netweaver licenses for each of those.
– Cost of any SSL licenses.
– Cost of operating system support.
– Cost of hardware & maintenance to run those.
– Cost of backups (admin & actual storage costs) to run those.
– Cost of HA/DR setup (cluster & replication maybe).
– Overhead of the risk assoiated with unplanned maintenance / outages (meltdown/spectre anyone?)
– Overhead of admin & regular security patching (we’re all doing the SAP super Tuesday patching – right).
– Overhead of yearly DR tests.
– Overhead of yearly backup & restore tests (are you even doing these?).
– Overhead of yearly PEN tests (if on the same subnet as your credit card transactional processing systems).
– Current rough uptime/SLAs.
