It's May again and as every year the ecosystem is gathering in Orlando to hear about the latest news related to SAP. And we sure got some big news in store for you this time around, because today, we - the SAP NetWeaver Cloud team - are very excited to announce that we are opening for business!
But wait.... even though we have started to spread the word about SAP's cloud platform last year at SAP TechEd already it may have gone unnoticed by the masses, hence it may be a good idea to step back and provide some introduction to SAP NetWeaver Cloud and what it is all about.
So, with this blog post I'd like to introduce you to the platform by sharing some of the content from some of the first documents we have collected in our all-newSAP HANA Cloud Platform Developer Center. Make sure to bookmark it if you are interested in development related stuff as from now this will be our base camp!
SAP NetWeaver Cloud
In a nutshell:
SAP NetWeaver Cloud is an open, standards-based and modular Platform as a Service for rapid development of on-demand applications.
It resides just in the middle of this trinity of service models that comprise the SAP Cloud Strategy (bottom-up):
- Infrastructure as a Service,
- Platform as a Service and
- Software as a Service.
So let's have a closer look on all of these parts before we focus on the platform, shall we?
At the bottom we have SAP HANA, which I assume does not need any further introduction anymore. Yet, what is important to mention though is that the platform fully leverages in-memory technologies allowing you to develop applications using SAP HANA. (If you want to catch up on SAP HANA let me redirect you to the SAP HANA Developer Center.)
The next layer is infrastructure (IaaS), which provides all the characteristics typically associated with the term 'cloud computing' in the sense of scalability, flexibility and being elastic. Here it's all about server parks and data centers, redundancy, fail-over setups and virtualization - see DevOps.
Open Platform
The platform provides the runtime environment for applications regardless of whether they are custom-build or subscription-based. From a technical perspective we are talking about an OSGi runtime environment that gives developers freedom of choice as it supports multiple programming models starting from Java EE 6 Web Profile and Spring Framework and future support for Ruby on Rails, Java 7, and other high productivity SDK’s.
That translates to: use whatever you know, use whatever you want!
The platform itself is based OpenSource frameworks like Apache and Eclipse and the standard distribution comes with a pre-defined set of frameworks typically required to develop applications to help you get started right away. Of course you are not limited to using these frameworks, but you can choose whatever libraries you want based on your needs.
The good thing about open standards and using OpenSource frameworks is that it comes with a low-entry barrier as there's plenty of documentation, best practices and examples freely available on the web. So regardless of whether you do in-house development or buy development services - it should be easier (and cheaper!) than ever to find people with the skills needed to develop your applications.
Platform Services
To speed up development even more SAP NetWeaver Cloud offers a growing set of central platform services like persistency, connectivity, identity and document management. For a complete overview about all the platform services currently available please see the SAP NetWeaver Cloud Technical Overview Presentation or if you want to get your feet wet then take a look at the SAP NetWeaver Cloud Documentation.
Yet, that's not all .. there's more. As we move onwards there will be even more offerings on top of the platform such as SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Portal Service - Product Information, which is currently in BETA and many more to be revealed throughout the year.
Wrap-up
As you can see we have been really busy lately polishing both the platform as well as the documentation and working on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Developer Center. From now on we will engage with you here on a regular basis as we believe that open platform also implies open communication and being approachable. So please do not hesitate to reach out to us: netweaver-cloud@sap.com
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