With the official announcement of the Cloud Foundry Foundation end of last year SAP also announced its platinum membership in the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
A lot has happened since that time and this blog post wants to address some of the questions we've been getting around the SAP HANA Cloud Platform and how it will leverage Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.
- What is SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
- Which roles do Cloud Foundry and OpenStack play in this?
- Which new services will be available in a Cloud Foundry enabled SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
- What happens to applications written with the current technology stack on SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
- Planned offerings and timelines
- What’s next?
- It’s an evolution, not a revolution
- Definitions
But before getting into the details let's first look into some basics in case you are new to this topic.
What is SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
The SAP HANA Cloud Platform is SAP’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to help developers develop, deploy and operate applications in the cloud. It has powerful standards-based services helping developers to quickly create enterprise-level applications.
Supported scenarios
The functionality and the services provided by SAP HANA Cloud Platform serve three main scenarios:
- Extend cloud and on-premise solutions: SAP partners and customers can use SAP HANA Cloud Platform to build innovative applications that extend SAP’s on-premise as well as Software-as-a-Service (Saas) applications.
- Integrate cloud and on-premise solutions: SAP partners and customers can leverage the SAP HANA Cloud Platform to simplify integration of traditional SAP on-premise applications such as SAP Financials with the new SAP Software-as-a-Service applications.
- Develop new applications: SAP is developing its new Cloud native applications on SAP HANA Cloud Platform as it simplifies development, deployment, security, and management of these applications in an efficient and consistent manner. SAP partners and customers can leverage in the same way to use SAP’s open and standards-based PaaS offering.
Figure 1: SAP HANA Cloud Platform
If you follow the release notes of the bi-weekly platform update you already know about the increased amount of services on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform over the past months. Examples are the SAP Web IDE, the Gamification Service (currently in BETA), SAP Adobe Forms as a Service by Adobe, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Internet of Things Service or the SAP API Management.
On the level of platform services the platform provides functionality to cover developer requirements around
- Security: services like the OAuth 2.0 Service, Keystore Service, SAP Cloud Identity Service, Authorization Management
- User Experience (UX): these include services like the SAP HANA Cloud Portal, SAP Mobile Documents, SAP Forms as a Service by Adobe, Feedback Service
- Integration: these include services like the SAP HANA Cloud Connector, HCI OData Provisioning, Remote Data Sync Service, API Management
- Collaboration: services like SAP Mobile Documents, Gamification Service, SAP Jam
- Analytics: services to help build analytical applications and dashboards like the predictive analytics library from SAP HANA
- IoT: the SAP HANA Cloud Platform IoT Services
- Mobile: the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Mobile Services
Which roles do Cloud Foundry and OpenStack play in this?
From the very beginning the guiding principle behind the development of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform was the goal to provide easy adoption by leveraging and using open standards and established open source components.
This principle is the driving force behind the ongoing efforts to leverage Cloud Foundry and OpenStack in the evolution of SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
These efforts
- will add additional deployment models
- will add additional programming languages/models to the platform
- emphasize SAP’s commitment to an open and standards-based PaaS offering
Cloud Foundry
The IT industry has adopted Cloud Foundry quickly as the standard PaaS technology. Cloud Foundry is an open source project with a broad community governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation with SAP as platinum member and active contributor.
SAP HANA Cloud Platform leverages Cloud Foundry as the technology for deployment and management of business applications.
OpenStack
SAP is also an active contributor to OpenStack with the clear goal to increase the openness and flexibility of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform also on the level of the necessary underlying infrastructure.
The OpenStack Foundation delivers an open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to help companies to build public or private clouds. SAP will leverage OpenStack on the IaaS layer of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
Leveraging Cloud Foundry and OpenStack
Support of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack simplifies deployment of applications built with or on top of SAP HANA Cloud Platform to partner data centers, as well as private Cloud deployments at customer data centers.
This provides flexibility of deployment models and access to new markets for SAP solutions. This is specifically true for current or potential partners with expertise in the usage of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.
So by leveraging OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, SAP enables developers, customers and partners to take advantage of the latest cloud technologies to drive and foster innovations in their business continuously.
Which new services will be available in a Cloud Foundry enabled SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
On the infrastructure layer the SAP HANA Cloud Platform will build on OpenStack-enabled data centers from SAP.
The number of supported runtimes/languages will increase. It’s planned to provide enterprise support for Java and Node.js and community support for Python, Ruby, PHP and GO.
On the list of data & storage services it’s planned to support Redis, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, PostgreSQL and Hadoop.
Figure 2: Planned target architecture of SAP HANA Cloud Platform with Cloud Foundry and OpenStack
The newly introduced business services will not only support developers with functionality to implement commerce scenarios faster and to handle loyalty management and billing in a standardized way (checkout yaas.io). More functionality will be provided over time in this area to further support developers for similar scenarios.
On the operations side the existing services will be adapted to handle the additional programming languages supported by Cloud Foundry accordingly. I.e. the developers will still use the SAP HANA Cloud Platform cockpit to manage the lifecycle of their applications and to manage the account within the account cockpit.
What happens to applications written with the current technology stack on SAP HANA Cloud Platform?
Applications written with the current technology stack on SAP HANA Cloud Platform will continue to run and not be impacted be SAP’s efforts regarding the implementation of Cloud Foundry an OpenStack.
Moving forward you’ll get additional flexibility around to deployment models as well as the usage of additional programming languages as already described above.
Planned offerings and timelines
One of the key benefits to use the open technologies from Cloud Foundry and OpenStack is the additional freedom one gets with regards to the deployment models for cloud solutions.
For the SAP HANA Cloud Platform this means that SAP will be able provide the platform not only as a public cloud offering as it is provided today.
It is also planned to provide an option to deploy SAP HANA Cloud Platform as a private cloud instance in customer and partner data centers who also support OpenStack.
Not all services available in the public cloud offering of SAP HANA Cloud Platform will be available in first private cloud shipments. Over time the scope of the private cloud deployments will grow.
What’s next?
At SAP TechEd 2015 we’ll talk about our ongoing efforts around the integration of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Get in touch with us and learn more on how far the Cloud Foundry and OpenStack integration has gotten.
The Cloud Foundry Summit 2015 in Berlin will provide you with additional means to get in touch with us and learn more about the SAP HANA Cloud Platform and how we integrate Cloud Foundry into it.
It’s an evolution, not a revolution
I hope that this blog post helped you to understand how much SAP believes in the open platform story by embracing the de-facto standards Cloud Foundry and OpenStack which provide customers and partners with more choice around programming languages/models as well as deployment models.
And the SAP HANA Cloud Platform will keep evolving and provide you with an open and up-to-date Platform-as-a-Service offering to help you creating enterprise-ready applications in the cloud with state-of-the-art technologies.
Stay tuned for more news and details coming along in the next weeks and months around the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
Best,
Rui
Definitions
- Private cloud
“The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.”
[see page 3 on http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf] - Public cloud
“The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.”
[see page 3 on http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf] - Data & storage services
Provide the persistence layer of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform - Platform services
Provide the functionality of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform that developers need to develop enterprise-ready applications - Business services
The business services support developers with functionality to implement commerce scenarios faster and to handle loyalty management and billing in a standardized way.
- SAP Managed Tags:
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