Hello and welcome to the SAP HANA Academy.
The topic of this video tutorial series is SAP Cloud Platform, Getting Started and in
this video we will provide a high-level overview of the environments.
This video has been recorded in September 2018.
For the most recent tutorial videos on this topic, please check the playlist on the SAP
HANA Academy.
Hi, I am Denys van Kempen.
The SAP Cloud Platform, our enterprise platform-as-a-service, provides two different environments on which
you can develop and run your applications.
One is called Neo, the other Cloud Foundry.
Neo is SAP technology, runs in data centers hosted by SAP.
Cloud Foundry is open source technology, runs in the data centers of our IaaS providers
(Infrastructure-as-a-Service): Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud
Platform (GCP).
Here we have a map with the current regions and environments.
We mostly see gold colored dots, those are SAP data centers, a couple of blue ones for
AWS, a Burgundy red one for Azure in Amsterdam, and a purple one for Google in Iowa.
This is the situation as of September 2018.
New regions and services are being added all the time.
If I scroll down a bit.
Here we have the different services, for example API Management.
This is available in both the Neo environment and Cloud Foundry.
So this service is hosted by both SAP and AWS and it is available pretty much around
the globe.
Same for Authorization and Trust Management, both Neo and Cloud Foundry: SAP, AWS, Azure
and GCP.
However, Big Data Services, for example, we can only get from SAP, and Blockchain Application
Enablement is only available in Cloud Foundry with today, a more limited regional availability.
AWS in Frankfurt, Germany and Virginia.
Today’s view.
Tomorrow may be different.
As I have said.
New regions and services are being added all the time.
The list goes on, and on, and on.
Lots and lots of services.
As a developer, it does not really matter all that much which environment provides which
service.
It is far more important to know what services are available and how you can use them.
For this, you can go to the cloudplatform.sap.com website and read about the different scenarios,
the different use cases, with architecture diagrams, with code samples and tutorial videos
from the SAP HANA and Cloud Academy.
For the different services, you can check the list of capabilities, for example SAP
HANA as a service, the in-memory database.
You can see here, under Provider, Region and Environment, where this service is available.
AWS, 5 regions, Cloud Foundry.
Azure, one region, Cloud Foundry.
SAP, all regions, Neo.
OK —Why do we have 2 environments?
What’s the difference?
Plain and simple: different technology.
Neo and Cloud Foundry both provide a development platform and runtime for applications.
However, the technology used to provide these services is quite different.
If we look at the scenarios, the use cases, we basically have two categories.
Extend or integrate on-premise and cloud solutions.
Software you or if you are partner, your customers, are already using, or
Develop new cloud applications.
Latest technologies.
Machine Learning, Blockchain, IoT (Internet-of-Things).
If we draw a traditional compute stack, hardware, operating system, database, application server,
and apps, both Neo and Cloud Foundry provide the functionality of the application server
/ database.
It is a runtime, a deployment platform.
On-premise, when running SAP applications, this probably would be a SAP Netweaver AS
system, running ABAP or Java applications.
If we turns this into cloud computing, we have the Infrastructure below (all virtualized),
in the middle (the middleware), Platform-as-a-Service, and on top Software-as-a-Service.
With Neo, SAP provides the whole stack, running inside a SAP data center, the same data center
where the cloud solutions are running you might want to integrate or extend.
SuccessFactors, S/4HANA Cloud, Ariba; they all run inside SAP data centers, of course.
You can pick your database, SAP ASE, SAP HANA, and the application server, the runtime, provides
Java.
This is how the SAP Cloud Platform got started.
Netweaver on-demand (neo), the very first name of the platform.
Then, the focus was on SAP HANA as the provider of the database and application server services,
SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
More recently, we have added Cloud Foundry as development and deployment platform.
For those less familiar, Cloud Foundry is an open source platform, originally conceived
by VMware and just like VMware helped develop a lot of the technology used today to virtualize
the infrastructure; AWS, Azure, GCP, they all provide virtual machinesthey also created
a virtualized deployment platform.
What this means, —and let me switch to the cloudfoundry.org website, here you can look
it all up, if you want to learn more— what this means, is that there are multiple certified
Cloud Foundry distributions (IBM, SAP, SUSE) which you can run on multiple certified infrastructure
providers.
Multi-vendor, multi-cloud.
So you can deploy your applications to cloud foundry and host it on AWS, or Azure, this
year, and switch to Google next year.
You can even switch from Cloud Foundry as provided by the SAP Cloud Platform to Cloud
Foundry from IBM.
This, of course, we are not going to recommend but it is certainly possible.
It is an open platform.
That’s part 1.
Part 2, is that Cloud Foundry provides multiple runtimes.
With Neo, the runtime is Java.
With Cloud Foundry, we have Java, we have Node.js (server-side JavaScript), we have
Go from Google, we have Python (great for Machine Learning), PHP, Ruby, microsoft.NET
and technically, any other runtime which you can provide.
Bring Your Own Runtime.
Bring Your Own Language.
It is an open platform.
Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, not every runtime is supported as of yet on the
Cloud Foundry environment as provided by the SAP Cloud Platform but, for sure, depending
on demand and priorities, this certainly would be possibleand because you can bring your
own runtime, this is exactly what SAP has done.
If we go back to cloudplatform.sap.com and look at the capabilities, ABAP, you can see
that the ABAP environment runs in Cloud Foundry and is hosted by AWS.
This may come as a surprise, you might have expected ABAP to run in the Neo environment,
considering it is core SAP technology, but that’s not the case.
It is a runtime, build by SAP, to run in Cloud Foundry.
If you are interested in this new technology, you can find more information on the developer
center on sap.com — I will put the links in the description of this video below.
But we are not there yet.
It gets even better.
Because Cloud Foundry is open source, just like Linux, you can create your own distribution,
your own version, and again, that’s exactly what SAP has done.
It is called SAP HANA XS Advanced (XSA).
It is the application server runtime of SAP HANA 2.0.
Same technology.
Of course, it is not exactly the same.
It has been modified to integrate with the SAP HANA in-memory database but the good part
is that you very easily develop applications to run on XSA on-premise, and then later,
if you want to scale up, go global, deploy the same application to Cloud Foundry.
To recap, cloud foundry is multi-cloud, there are multiple certified infrastructure providers.
Runs cloud-native apps, micro-services architecture, multiple runtimes supported, including ABAP.
And because SAP HANA XS Advanced leverages the same cloud foundry technology, it is very
easy to move your applications from on-premise to the cloud (and back).
OK.
Before we sign-off.
How does this look?
I am connected here to the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit.
Here we have all our regions.
Cloud Foundry environment and Neo.
Let’s start with Neo.
Rot is the data center next door to the SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany.
This is my current home for the cockpit.
We are now connected to eu1.hana.ondemand.com
I will select my Cloud Academy global account.
It is a developer account.
This account has two subaccounts in two regions.
One for the Cloud Foundry environment hosted by AWS and one for the Neo environment, hosted
by SAP.
I am now connect to Neo.
We see the system status of my Java or HTML5, SAPUI5, Fiori applications.
I have not deployed any app yet.
We can create our database schemas here, SAP HANA or ASE.
Connectivity to any on-premise system.
Destinations.
Setup Security, integrate with an LDAP provider.
Microsoft Active Directory.
And enable services.
Integrate with a corporate Git system.
SAP Web IDE, a browser-based development environment also available as-a-service.
Or we can switch to the Cloud Foundry environment.
Select your Space.
Cloud Foundry works with spaces —we will explain the cloud foundry architecture in
another video— and then here we would see our deployed applications.
Different technology, works slightly different but here we have some services for this particular
subaccount.
Environments and regions are documented in the SAP Cloud Platform guide on the SAP Help
Portal and here you can find the URLs (the API endpoints) for the different environments
with a link to the Cockpit.
For Cloud Foundryand for the Neo environment.
Information about environments
And the link to the SAP Cloud Platform Regions and Service Portfolio — with all the services.
OK —so much for this SAP Cloud Platform environment overview, thanks for watching.
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