Abap on the SAP Cloud Platform - a good thing?

The topic of Abap and SCP (SAP Cloud Platform) has been hotly debated since it was announced. It remains to be seen how many customers will take advantage of this offer. But this step is more than just another programming language in which apps can be developed on the SCP. This further development is a technological milestone for the Abap server on the one hand and for the Abap community on the other.

The "SAP Cloud Platform Abap Environment", as the official name of the offering on the SCP is called, or somewhat shorter and more concise Abap PaaS (Platform as a Service), is rightly the subject of controversy.

Critics ask themselves why a proprietary programming language that saw the light of day in 1983 as the "General Report Conditioning Processor" is being ported to a PaaS environment?

Abap PaaS is not suitable for the development of lightweight microservices that live in containers, if only because of the SAP Hana database required. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for SAP to make this investment.

Compared to the communities of other programming languages, the Abap developer community is not known for being particularly innovative. This can be seen, for example, in the new Eclipse-based Abap Development Tools (ADT).

These were introduced and delivered back in 2011. Despite new artifacts, such as Core Data Services, which can only be developed with ADT, the distribution among existing SAP customers is still manageable.

With Abap PaaS, the excuse that development in the cloud is of no interest to Abap developers no longer applies. SAP has thus paved the way to the cloud for Abap developers. At the same time, this has also secured investments by SAP, partners and customers in the Abap expertise of employees.

There are also technical aspects that should be considered: In all the discussion about the added value of Abap PaaS, it should not be forgotten that there are already two SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings based on Abap, namely S/4 Hana Cloud and Business by Design, whose CRM offering is now known as Cloud4Customer.

Nevertheless, the offerings are not really comparable, as Abap PaaS takes the opportunity to cut off old habits and also does not offer the full range of languages and not all the reuse components of the NetWeaver application server.

Compared to a familiar NetWeaver app server, this is a very slimmed-down runtime environment, which is only offered in combination with a Hana database on the SCP.

It is easy to imagine that SAP has a vested interest in reducing the resource footprint of Abap systems in the cloud. With the transformation from software manufacturer to cloud provider, the resource hunger of its own products is changing from a cost factor for customers to one for SAP.

Since, according to the current roadmap, there will no longer be a new version of the SAP NetWeaver Application Server, Abap PaaS will be positioned as the platform for customer and partner enhancements based on SAP Abap.

In order to be able to update S/4 Hana systems as easily as possible and thus benefit from SAP's innovations, enhancements should not be made directly in S/4, but in a separate environment if possible.

One option for this is Abap PaaS. True to Björn Goerke's motto: "Keep the core clean." (See also TechEd keynote Barcelona 2018.)