At
SAPPHIRENOW 2017 in Orlando, Florida, SAP announced the General Availability (GA) of the Cloud Foundry environment within the SAP Cloud Platform. This forms a major step towards M
ulti-Cloud architecture and
Openness of the SAP Cloud Platform and accelerates SAP’s strategy and vision of growing as the
‘Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service’ (E-PaaS) provider of choice.
Apart from the advantages mentioned above, the introduction of
Cloud Foundry also brings in flexibility and choice. Developers on the SAP Cloud Platform are no longer limited to use the languages supported by the platform (Java, XSJS and SAPUI5) or the Data & Storage options provided by the platform (SAP HANA and SAP ASE).
Talking just from the point of view of Data Storage and Management options, available on the (
earlier) SAP HANA Cloud Platform, a platform developer had two options. Use SAP HANA as persistence, when building data-intensive or analytics-heavy applications or use SAP ASE for transactional applications. As indicated by the rename announcements at the Mobile World Congress 2016, the SAP Cloud Platform is much more than just HANA (hence the rename to SAP HANA Cloud Platform).
In this blog, I will try to outline the various data management technologies that we bring in, with the Cloud Foundry environment on the SAP Cloud Platform.
Of course, we also fully realize the enormous potential and value that HANA brings to applications built on the SAP Cloud Platform. So, HANA becomes the first and currently the only, Data & Storage option that is available on both the Neo and Cloud Foundry environments. More on this later.
Embracing Open-Source Alternatives
The arrival of Cloud Foundry into the SAP Cloud Platform, not only brings in support for Node.js & other programming languages via the BYOL model; it also brings with it the option of consuming the following open-source(based), industry-proven and community- loved Data & Storage technologies to enhance the platform capabilities and accelerate development of innovative applications on the SAP Cloud Platform.
Additions to the “
Data & Storage” capability:
PostgreSQL on SAP Cloud Platform:
Brings an open-source Object-Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS) to the SAP Cloud Platform; combining the concepts of object oriented design and relational databases. The database is ACID compliant and supports majority of standard SQL.
Current Version on SAP Cloud Platform:
9.4
The following service plans are available for use on the SAP Cloud Platform:
MongoDB on SAP Cloud Platform:
Brings an open-source document-oriented NoSQL database to the SAP Cloud Platform. Unlike traditional relational databases which stress on rigid schema and table structure, MongoDB supports dynamic schema with JSON-like document structure.
Current Version on SAP Cloud Platform:
3.0
The following service plans are available for use on the SAP Cloud Platform:
Object Store on SAP Cloud Platform:
Brings in Object Storage capabilities to the SAP Cloud Platform. It supports storage of unstructured data like Files, Binaries, etc., as ‘Objects’ in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. The service handles the creation of S3 buckets and transfers the secure credentials of the created bucket to the application, so that ‘Objects’ can be created and managed in these buckets.
The following service plans are available for use on the SAP Cloud Platform:
Redis on SAP Cloud Platform:
Brings in an advanced, open-source, in-memory, key-value store to the SAP Cloud Platform. It is a multi-faceted tool, in that, it can be used as a database, a cache and a message broker. It can achieve extraordinary performance due to the usage of an in-memory data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, and so on.
Current Version on SAP Cloud Platform:
3.0
The following service plans are available for use on the SAP Cloud Platform:
Addition to the “
Integration” capability:
RabbitMQ on SAP Cloud Platform:
Brings in an open-source message broker to the SAP Cloud Platform. It can be used to setup robust, asynchronous messaging between applications. The service implements the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP).
Current Version on SAP Cloud Platform:
3.6
The following service plans are available for use on the SAP Cloud Platform:
Apart from the above service plans, all the services (except Object Store) also provide a
“dev” service plan each; which is currently available free of cost, but without any enterprise support or SLAs. This plan can be utilized for learning and development purposes.
“dev”plans:
Although we have brought open-source technologies into the SAP Cloud Platform, we have made sure that the services are suitable for building Enterprise-grade applications. In this regard, we have built the following Enterprise qualities into these services:
- High Availability: All services are built to be inherently highly available, based on their technology-specific implementations. Every service plan available to the customer (except the Redis single-node plans and the ‘dev’ plans), are highly-available clusters.
- Managed Backup and Restore: The platform provides Managed Backup and Restore capabilities for the PostgreSQL and MongoDB services. Full database backups are taken once per day and the backups are store for 14 days, after which they will be deleted. A restore will be possible to any point of time in the past 14 days.
- Security: Creation of instances for any of the services, also creates a secure user id and password, which can be used when binding these instances to applications running on the Cloud Foundry environment of the platform.
What about SAP HANA?
Without a doubt, SAP HANA is still a valuable data storage option and a major component of the SAP Cloud Platform. In this regard, SAP HANA (with version 2.0) is also available as a service on the new Cloud Foundry environment.
The capabilities of the service will be quite comparable to its counterpart on the Neo environment. From the point of view of service plans, the 32GB version of SAP HANA will not find a place on the Cloud Foundry environment, but in addition to the service plans available in the Neo environment, the Base and Platform editions of SAP HANA with a memory of 2TB will be available on AWS for consumption on the Cloud Foundry environment.
The SAP HANA service on the Cloud Foundry environment will be enabled with multitenant database container (MDC) support by default. The HANA system will be assigned to a Cloud Foundry space and will allow the creation of multiple tenant databases which can then be used to bind to multiple applications on the platform.
A shared HANA will also be made available on the Cloud Foundry environment trial landscape.
Summary
Introduction of the Cloud Foundry environment in the SAP Cloud Platform, brings in, new capabilities like NoSQL, Message Brokers, Object Storage to the SAP Cloud Platform. In addition to the existing relational capabilities of the platform (HANA), the Data Management portfolio on the new environment is a formidable power, which brings in the flexibility of choosing any service on the SAP Cloud Platform, based on need and the relevant use case.
More information:
Consume the Cloud Foundry services : Tutorials
https://help.sap.com/viewer/65de2977205c403bbc107264b8eccf4b/Cloud/en-US/8105b26e430a4aea9dc46a7aa6f...
Data Management on Cloud Platform : FAQ
https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/SAPHCP/Data+Management+on+SAP+Cloud+Platform+%3A+Frequently+As...
