Technical Articles
Cloud Computing from SAP and other Hyperscalers
The Term “Cloud Computing” exists in IT Industry as early as 1996. The acceleration of the Technology growth has made the realization of cloud computing possible to the highest extend in a shortest time frame. Today the cloud-native and distributed systems have become inherent part of our life. The shopping experience from Amazon or the binge-watching on Netflix wouldn’t have been possible without cloud computing. With this accelerated technology growth, the notion of competition has become a relationship of past and the state of ally among the Infrastructure and Software manufactures has become a norm with the only notion of providing superior customer experience to all.
SAP being a global company, our customers have a demand to offer their solutions to their global customers with different legal regulations across the globe. So, relying on a single hyperscaler may not be possible as some regions doesn’t have a preferred vendor coverage. To solve this challenge, SAP had embraced Hyperscalers with the Multi-Cloud strategy to offer our customers the flexibility of Infrastructure of their choice and offer our cloud solutions in all possible regions across the globe. Now our Customers and Partners have the full advantage to mix and match the different hyperscaler services of their choice alongside the unified, business-centric, and open Business Technology Platform Services (BTP).
What is Business Technology Platform?
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is a unified, open and business-centric platform that runs on all these cloud infrastructures and brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration, and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.
The final decision on the choice of region, hyperscaler, service, etc. should be primarily based on the business demand, regulation requirements and TCO considerations. However, with this blog post, I would like to emphasize the availability of equivalent, innovative, and best of breed offerings from SAP BTP and related SAP Cloud Solution. This list is certainly not complete as there are numerous PaaS capabilities that exists on BTP and on the mentioned cloud platforms. I am only trying to scratch the surface to stimulate your curiosity.
Disclaimer:
This blog post is a humble attempt to share the knowledge on SAP’s cloud capabilities of BTP and other cloud service offerings in parallel to the Hyperscaler’s equivalent to act only as a starting point of reference (mind map) for someone who wants to build their know-how on SAP Cloud services given their past Hyperscaler background. This blog post is not intended for any kind of comparison and cannot be made liable for the equivalence that is drawn between different hyperscaler offerings and to that of SAP. The contents of this blog post should not be used as a base for making any legal or contractual decision. Here “equivalent” only means closely related in my personal view and not SAP’s official position. There is no guarantee on the full feature scope or one to one replacement. For details of the exact feature, refer to the Feature Scope Description of individual services and talk to your Account Executive or Customer Engagement Executive before making any purchase decision.
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Cloud Computing |
Hyperscalers |
SAP |
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Category |
Sub-Category |
AWS |
Azure |
GCP |
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| Compute | Virtual Machine | Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) | Azure Virtual Machines | Google Compute Engine | |
| Container Service | Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) | Azure Kubernetes Service | Google Kubernetes Engine | SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime project “Gardener” |
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| Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) | Azure Container Service | Google Cloud Run | SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime |
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| Serverless (Function as a Service) | Lambda | Azure Functions | Google Cloud Functions | SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime “Serverless” |
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| Scalability | Auto Scaling Group (ASG) | Azure Autoscale | Compute Engine Autoscaler | Application Autoscaler |
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| Storage | Object-Store | Simple Storage Service (S3) | Azure Blob Storage | Google Cloud Storage | Object Store on SAP BTP |
| File-Store | Elastic File Storage (EFS) | Azure File Storage | Google Filestore | ||
| Block/Disk-Store | Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Azure Disk Storage | Google Persistent Disk | ||
| In-Memory | ElastiCache | Azure Cache for Redis | Google Memorystore | Redis on SAP BTP, hyperscaler option |
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| Physical Containers | Snowball | Azure Databox | Transfer Appliance | ||
| Snowball Edge | |||||
| Snowmobile | Azure Databox Heavy | ||||
| Cold Storage | S3 Glacier | Azure Archive Storage | |||
| Networking | Virtual Cloud | Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | Virtual Network (vNet) | Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | |
| Firewall | Security Groups | VPC Service Controls | |||
| Gateway | NAT Instance | ||||
| NAT Gateway | |||||
| Load Balancer | Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) | Azure Load Balancer | Cloud Load Balancer | ||
| CDN | CloudFront | Azure CDN | Cloud CDN | ||
| DNS Routing | Route53 | Azure DNS | Cloud DNS | SAP Custom Domain Service |
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| Traffic Director | |||||
| Security Access | Identity and Access Management (IAM) | Azure Active Directory | Identity and Access Management (IAM) | Authorization and Trust Management Service |
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| Cognito | Cloud Identity | SAP Cloud Identity Services – Authentication and Provisioning |
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| Database | RDS | Aurora | |||
| MySQL | Azure Database for MySQL | Cloud SQL for MySQL | |||
| MariaDB | Azure Database for MariaDB | ||||
| PostgreSQL | Azure Database for PSQL | Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL on SAP BTP, hyperscaler option |
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| Oracle | |||||
| Microsoft SQL Server | Azure SQL Database | Cloud SQL for SQL Server | SAP HANA Service for SAP BTP |
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| Cloud Spanner | |||||
| Analytics | Redshift | Azure Synapse Analytics | Google BigQuery | SAP Analytics Cloud |
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| Quickshift | Microsoft Power BI | Google Looker | |||
| Big Data | Azure Data Lake | BigQuery Serverless DW | SAP Data Warehouse Cloud |
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| NoSQL | DynamoDB | Azure Cosmos DB | |||
| Azure Table Storage | Cloud Bigtable (key/value) | ||||
| Firestore (document) | |||||
| In-Memory | Memorystore In-Memory | SAP HANA Cloud |
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| Application Integration | Queue | Simple Queue Service (SQS) | Azure Queue Storage | Google Pub/Sub | |
| Event Bus | EventBridge | Azure Service Bus | Google Eventarc | SAP Event Mesh |
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| Notification | Simple Notification Service (SNS) | Azure Notifications Hub | Google Pub/Sub | SAP Alert Notification Service for SAP BTP |
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| Streaming | Kinesis | Azure Stream Analytics | |||
| Development Tools | Editor | Cloud9 | Azure VS Code | Google Cloud Shell online code editor | SAP Business Application Studio |
| Cloud code / Cloud Code for IntelliJ | |||||
| SDK | AWS Software Developmnt Kit (SDK) | Azure SDK | Google Cloud SDK | SAP Cloud SDK |
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| CLI | AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) | Azure CLI | Google Cloud SDK | SAP BTP Command Line Interface |
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| Azure Powershell | |||||
| AWS CloudShell | Azure CloudShell | SAP BTP Cockpit Terminal |
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| Platform as a Service (PaaS) | Elastic BeanStalk | Azure App Services | Google App Engine | SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry Runtime |
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| AWS Amplify | Firebase | ||||
| Gateway | API Gateway | Azure API Apps | Cloud Endpoints API Gateway | SAP API Management |
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| Azure API Management | Apigee API Platform/Management | ||||
| CI/CD | AWS CodePipeline | Azure Pipelines | Cloud Build | SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery |
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| Tekton | |||||
| Container/Artifact Registry | |||||
| Automation | Amazon Machine Image (AMI) | ||||
| CloudFormation | Azure Deployment Manager | Cloud Deployment Manager | |||
| Hybrid | Storage Gateway | ||||
| AWS Direct Connect | Azure ExpressRoute | Cloud Interconnect | SAP Connectivity Service |
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| Portal | AWS Console | Azure Portal | Google Cloud Console | SAP BTP Cockpit |
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| Services | Monitoring | CloudWatch | Azure Monitor Logs | Cloud Monitoring | SAP Monitoring Service for SAP BTP |
| Cloud Logging | SAP Appication Logging Service for SAP BTP |
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| AWS X-Ray | Cloud Trace | Dynatrace Agent Activation for SAP BTP |
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| Governance | CloudTrail | Audit Logs in Azure Active Directory | Cloud Audit Logs | SAP Audit Log Service |
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| Batch Operations | AWS Batch | Azure Batch | Cloud Scheduler | SAP Job Scheduling Service |
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| Workflow | AWS Simple Workflow Service (SWF) | Azure Logic Apps | Workflows | SAP Workflow Management |
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| Cloud Tasks | |||||
| Low-Code-No-Code (LCNC) | SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation |
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| Amazon Honeycode | Microsoft Power Apps on Azure | Google AppSheet | SAP AppGyver |
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| SAP Rapid Application Development by Mendix |
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| IoT | AWS IoT Core | Azure IoT Hub | Cloud IoT | SAP Internet of Things |
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| SAP Edge Services |
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| Cross/Multi-Cloud | Azure Arc | Anthos | |||
| AI/ML | Platform | Amazon Machine Learning | Azure Machine Learning | Vertex AI | SAP Data Intelligence |
| Amazon SageMaker | Azure AI Infrastructure | TensorFlow | SAP AI Business Services |
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| Amazon Lex | QnAMaker | DialogFlow | SAP Conversational AI |
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| Many More | … | … | … | … | … |
P.S. Do you find something that I had misunderstood or mapped here wrongly by mistake, please let me know. I will correct and update this blog post. Happy to learn from your expertise.
Did you find this blog post useful, then I would encourage you to share with your connections and Do you have any feedback, Please do comment.
Would you like to learn more about SAP BTP, find here our community page dedicated to SAP BTP
Are you ready and want to try out SAP BTP, Find more information on SAP BTP’s Free Trial and Free Tier offering to get started right away.
References:
• Google Cloud – based on the preparation content for “Google Cloud Digital Leader”
• AWS – based on the preparation content for “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate” & “AWS Certified Developer – Associate”
• Azure – based on the preparation content for “Azure Fundamentals”
• SAP – based on the preparation content for SAP Business Technology Platform – https://open.sap.com/courses?topic=SAP+Business+Technology+Platform in general and other specific courses like the ones mentioned below and many more
• “OpenSAP SAP Business Technology Platforrm in a Nutshell” – https://open.sap.com/courses/btp1
• “OpenSAP SAP Cloud Platforrm Essentials” – https://open.sap.com/courses/cp1-3
• “Microlearning OpenSAP Expert BTP” – https://microlearning.opensap.com/channel/Expert+SAP+Business+Technology+Platform/