Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
jana_richter
Active Participant
With SAPPHIRE taking place this week, SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry environment is going into general availability on the infrastructure providers Google Cloud Platform (in US) and Microsoft Azure (in Europe). Within this blog I want to share some more details about the scope, the co-innovation activities, the latest innovations SAP Cloud Platform on AWS and give some more details on the announced partnership with IBM.

Scope of SAP Cloud Platform in Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform

SAP Cloud Platform is a fully managed platform-as-a-service offering, where SAP provides and operates the technical services – to allow you to focus on developing and running your applications, without the need to manage the underlying stack. SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry environment is available multi-cloud – so you can develop your applications once, and then deploy into your location of choice. The centerpiece of the environment is the application runtime where you can deploy and run your applications. Moreover, these open source backing services are available:

  • PostgreSQL – an object-relational database

  • Redis – to implement an in-memory caching layer

  • RabbitMQ – offers reliable and robust messaging between applications

  • MongoDB – document-oriented NoSQL document store

  • Object Store – for storage and management of unstructured data


In addition, SAP HANA as the in-memory, column-oriented and relational database is provided as well – in two editions, standard and enterprise on both AWS and GCP infrastructures, and for Microsoft Azure planned for Q3 2018 availability.

Moreover, SAP Cloud Platform capabilities such as connectivity service, destination service, feature flags, autoscaler and application logging.

Overall, this allows you to develop and run cloud-native applications within SAP Cloud Platform – either in your tools of choice or by leveraging SAP WebIDE or Rapid Application Development by Mendix. And by using connectivity and destination services, you can connect to other cloud services like SAPs cloud products as well as securely accessing On-Premise backend systems leveraging the SAP Cloud Connector – thus you can extend your SAP solutions with your own developments in the cloud platform.

A glimpse on the Co-Innovation

Providing SAP Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have been and still are strategic co-innovation projects. Especially on the network infrastructure and underlying VMs and hardware resources some joined activities were needed, to be able to deploy Cloud Foundry and the above-mentioned services at scale - allowing a uniform offering despite underlying differences. Here I would like to give you a few insights on what has been achieved together to have SAP Cloud Platform available on the two new infrastructure providers

With Microsoft Azure, we had joined efforts on topics like supporting managed disks, application security groups, availability sets and availability zones and virtual machines to support the requirements for SAP HANA as in-memory database in different sizes.

For Google Cloud Platform, a few highlight topics are NAT as service feature for large scale workloads of VMs that reside in private networks, Blog storage API credentials and load balancer tcp-based health checks.

Latest innovations for SAP Cloud Platform on Amazon Web Services

Of course, for our existing SAP Cloud Platform on AWS, some advancements have been made in the last few months as well.

Most notably, the data center coverage meanwhile comprehends Europe, US and Brazil – and in the next few weeks and months it’s planned to add Japan, Canada and Singapore as additional data center locations.

Moreover, another major highlight is the availability of SAP HANA services (standard or enterprise edition) in smaller “chunks” – so you can consume HANA in so-called HANA Compute Units, which allows you to pay only per consumed hour and to flexibly size the database according to your needs. BTW: this is available for SAP Cloud Platform in GCP as well – and we plan to bring it to the other landscapes in the future as well. Find more details in this blog about SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA service .

Overall, to improve the overall SAP Cloud Platform experience, the domain model and the visualization in the cockpit with regards to hierarchy of global accounts, subaccounts and regions has been adapted – you can find more details in the step-by-step blog. (this of course applies to SAP Cloud Platform overall, irrespective of the data center location or underlying infrastructure provider)

 

Outlook – SAP Cloud Platform private edition on IBM Cloud

At Sapphire, you might have heard about the announcement with IBM Cloud – I would like to put this into the overall context here as well. Private edition means that customers receive dedicated platform instances that isolate data, storage and network environment from other customers instances. SAP and IBM announced the plan to release SAP Cloud Platform, private edition on IBM Cloud - comprising a subset of services offered by SAP Cloud Platform for the initial shipment. You can find more details in this FAQ document.
6 Comments