The latest information on the updated backing services strategy can be found in the below blog.

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/02/11/consuming-hyper-scaler-backing-services-on-sap-cloud-platform-an-update/ 

The below information should be used just for historical context.

Context

At Sapphire 2018, SAP announced its strategy and vision to deliver the ‘Intelligent Enterprise’, to help customers achieve game-changing business outcomes, with unmatched focus, agility, and visibility, to help them become – “a best-run business”.

SAP Cloud Platform – SAP’s open platform-as-a-service offering, forms the ‘Central Nervous System’ and the technology enabler of the Intelligent Enterprise. It forms an integral part of the ‘Digital Platform’ in the Intelligent Enterprise framework, and facilitates integration and extension of business processes in our Intelligent Applications.

During the recent Sapphire 2019 at Orlando,  Gunther Rothermel, President – SAP Cloud Platform, announced that, in order to facilitate our customers’ journey towards ‘Intelligent Enterprise’, we will evolve the key platform pillar – SAP Cloud Platform, into a true ‘Business Technology Platform’.

The evolution begins…

SAP Cloud Platform’s strategy will transform to deliver a unique business technology platform, providing customers the business services needed to solve their business problems efficiently.

SAP wants to strategically invest in areas which differentiate us, such as business services; which are being built on a strong foundation of decades of business process knowledge and excellence.

Following the core principles of ‘openness‘ and ‘freedom of choice‘, the platform will partner and integrate with hyper-scale providers intensively. Customers will have the flexibility to select any hyper-scaler of their choice to procure commodity technical services like the open-source backing services. This will in-turn help customers leverage hyper-scaler technology innovations within their SAP landscapes.

As of today, SAP Cloud Platform is announced to be available on the following hyper-scaler infrastructures – Amazon Web Service(AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba (AliCloud).

As a first step towards this strategic goal, starting July 15th, 2019, we announce the retirement of SAP ‘managed’ open-source backing services offerings – PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and RabbitMQ, from SAP Cloud Platform pricelists.

Since their inception, the four open-source backing services have provided SQL, NoSQL storage and messaging capabilities on the platform respectively.

The platform will, however, continue to deliver services like SAP HANA and SAP Enterprise Messaging, which can serve as viable alternatives, to most of the use cases addressed by the 4 open-source services. We recommend you to first evaluate if these services cater to your requirement. If not, you should look towards hyper-scalers.

At this point, it is worth noting that most of the open-source backing services have hyper-scaler native counter-parts or equivalents, which can be leveraged by SAP Cloud Platform applications. We will also work towards enabling consumption of these hyper-scaler alternatives (if available), on the platform. Subsequent blogs will address the consumption of hyper-scaler services by SAP Cloud Platform applications.

What does this mean for you?

This change – retirement of SAP ‘managed’ backing services’, would be applicable only to new customer contracts, post-July 2019.

Existing customers who are using any of the 4 services – PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis or RabbitMQ, will have continued support until the end of the contract. But, it is also advised to start your evaluation for alternatives early, so that you have a plan-of-action at hand before the end of the current contract.

SAP Cloud Platform trial experience

The change will also affect your platform trial experience. A good trial always gives users a taste of what to expect when they go productive on the platform. With this rationale in mind, the trial i.e. ‘dev’ plan offerings for all the 4 open-source services will also be discontinued from new trial accounts and trial extensions created beyond July 15th.

Hyper-scaler services and BYOA (Bring Your Own Account) model

It is prudent to acknowledge that most customers might already possess a hyper-scaler footprint with one or the other provider, beyond the scope of their current project with SAP Cloud Platform.

Customers who choose to consume hyper-scaler native services, for example, AWS RDS PostgreSQL, using applications built on SAP Cloud Platform, would be required to procure an AWS account from Amazon, in addition to their existing SAP Cloud Platform subscription.

Customers can then go on to create and manage the service offerings directly from their hyper-scaler accounts.

With this BYOA (Bring Your Own Account) model, customers can (re) use the hyper-scaler account and its services, with applications on their SAP Cloud Platform accounts. The BYOA approach will also be applicable to SAP Cloud Platform trial accounts.

Summary

• SAP Cloud Platform has started its’ evolution into a true ‘Business Technology Platform’. The platform will focus on providing business services.
• The platform will provide ‘openness’ and ‘freedom of choice’ by partnering with hyper-scaler champions for commodity technical services.
• SAP will discontinue its ‘managed’ offerings for the open-source backing services – PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and RabbitMQ on the platform starting July 15th, 2019 (for new contracts).
• Existing customer contracts which include these backing services will be supported until the contract end date.
• SAP homegrown services like HANA and Enterprise messaging will be the ‘go-to’ recommendations to cater to storage and messaging scenarios.
• Customers still interested in using open-source alternatives will need to purchase directly from hyper-scalers.
• The hyper-scaler services can be used with SAP Cloud Platform using the BYOA (Bring Your Own Account) approach.

We have published an FAQ document to address any questions you might have on this strategy change and the way forward.

Supporting materials, guides, and tutorials to help you through this transition will be published along the way.

In case the FAQ does not answer all your queries, you can also write to sapcpcoresupport@sap.com with ‘Backing services retirement’ in the Email Subject for prompt responses.

UPDATE:

Reference Links:

1. Help documentation for hyper-scaler PostgreSQL: https://help.sap.com/viewer/product/PostgreSQL/Cloud/en-US
2. Hyper-scaler service consumption as UPS: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/07/19/consuming-hyperscaler-managed-services-on-sap-cloud-platform-as-user-provided-services/
3. A blog for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL consumption: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/08/05/amazon-rds-postgresql-consumption-on-sap-cloud-platform/
4. A blog for Azure PostgreSQL consumption: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/10/02/azure-postgresql-consumption-on-sap-cloud-platform-cloud-foundry/