Kubernetes Is Driving Innovation in the SAP Environment

The Kubernetes container management system recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. In those ten years, Kubernetes has conquered the data centers of small, medium, and large enterprises, as well as large cloud providers. Instead of deploying an additional virtual machine for each new business application, Kubernetes monitors all resources and workloads in a cluster.

As orchestration software, Kubernetes takes care of selecting the right machine for an application container and launching that container on that machine. Developers package their applications into container images to do this. By thinking of a data center as a single mass of computing resources, organizations can make the most of existing capacity and deploy new applications in the shortest possible time.

Don't look outisde the sandbox

A Kubernetes cluster ensures that all applications receive only the CPU and memory resources they need. The underlying container technology also ensures that all applications are separated from each other so as to not affect each other. Each container runs in a sandbox, so no application can see beyond the boundaries of said sandbox. Kubernetes itself consists of a large number of microservices and is completely open source.

Anyone interested can download and install the individual components from the Internet. However, this would be very tedious and time-consuming, as a Kubernetes cluster is a complex IT system in itself. Suse, the Linux and Kubernetes specialist, offers a complete Kubernetes portfolio with the Rancher management platform that meets all the requirements of modern IT operations, including all the necessary certifications, such as the FIPS 140-2 security standard. In addition, Suse customers will receive professional support for the installation and operation of their Rancher clusters.

In addition to Kubernetes itself, Suse also provides all the components that are part of a modern IT landscape: in addition to Longhorn for native storage connectivity, users can access a variety of applications such as PostgreSQL, Redis, or Grafana directly from the Rancher interface.

Kubernetes from an SAP perspective

As a long-time SAP partner, Suse offers SAP customers a complete portfolio to migrate their applications to Kubernetes. This is becoming increasingly important, especially with the retirement of SAP PI/PO in 2027. SAP users will need to migrate their integrations to the new SAP Integration Suite (part of SAP BTP) by that date. Since in many cases data is processed that must not leave the company's own data center, users rely on the Edge Integration Cell (EIC) developed by SAP, which runs exclusively on Kubernetes. They benefit from the flexibility, security, and performance of a Kubernetes cluster.

Many companies are already using Suse Rancher, so the barriers to running the EIC are very low. SAP has already validated several versions of Rancher for the EIC. This guarantees smooth operation. The next three years will see a large number of migrations to Kubernetes and the EIC. SAP users should begin exploring their options now to ensure a smooth transition.

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