PaaS industry standard Cloud Foundry

What does a manufacturer and provider of business solutions want with an Internet store? is what many in the community asked themselves in amazement when the "SAP Store" saw the light of day some time ago.

Visitors to the store may now be rubbing their eyes in view of the fact that the number of apps offered there increased conspicuously last year in particular.

A key driver can be identified for this circumstance: HCP - the Hana Cloud Platform, SAP's own PaaS cloud solution including in-memory technology. With the platform provided by SAP in the cloud, (web) applications and solutions can be developed and deployed or delivered easily, cost-efficiently and quickly.

HCP is now used by numerous start-up companies, customers, partners and SAP itself. The apps created can be offered for sale in the SAP Store for a wide variety of applications and uses.

It is obvious that the importance and significance of the Hana Cloud Platform will continue to grow strongly. Especially against the following background: customer-required add-on solutions, for example, for the SAP Cloud SaaS solutions (Software as a Service) such as Success Factors, Ariba, Fieldglass or Concur are developed and provided on the basis of HCP; likewise the multitude of necessary customer-specific add-ons or industry-relevant apps for S/4 as well as for the industry-specific S/4 versions.

Notably, they can be seamlessly integrated into the next-generation business suite - whether on-premise or cloud-based.

PaaS as a cloud service is based on IaaS. For both IaaS and PaaS, SAP relies on open source or open standards. Specifically, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.

Like the OpenStack Foundation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation is a free project supported by well-known companies (currently 55) across manufacturers as a non-profit organization, e.g. SAP and Suse.

Other companions include IBM, Cisco, HPE, Vmware, Huawei, Fujitsu, Povital and Intel, but also non-IT companies such as GE. Incidentally, when Cloud Foundry was founded just under two years ago, it also became the 13th company in the world.

Collaboration Project of the Linux Foundation. As the first Linux distributor, Suse has been a member of the OpenStack Foundation since 2012 and introduced the first enterprise OpenStack solution, Suse Cloud, in the same year.

Suse has been a Cloud Foundry Foundation member since 2015. Of course, the Foundation produces concrete software with Cloud Foundry and the Cloud Foundry components, and does so according to open source development principles.

The OpenStack counterpart also certifies the various PaaS solutions of Cloud Foundry members. This ensures that cloud platforms based on a uniform and open standard are compatible and consistent with each other, e.g. the Hana Cloud Platform with IBM Bluemix, HPE Helion or, or, or.

SAP and Suse are also working closely together in this area. The extended cooperation now focuses on the provision of an OpenStack Cloud Provider Interface (CPI).

The main goal here is to use a CPI to simplify or automate communication between Cloud Foundry and the underlying OpenStack infrastructure.

At the end of the day, you are able to test application apps more easily and roll them out and deploy them in private or public clouds immediately. Ultimately, the focus of using PaaS in particular, and cloud deployment in general, is to deliver new or enhanced applications easily, quickly, and cost-effectively to add value to the business.

In other words, the Cloud Foundry and OpenStack integration being pushed by SAP and Suse is a beneficial merger of two important cloud cosms and, on top of that, benefits the use of open source in the SAP environment as a whole.