SAP + OSS + OST = PASSST SOO!

Recently, the opinion page of this magazine said that an OpenStack euphoria exists. If in the meaning of ευφορία an "exuberant state of mind" is meant, I disagree.

I say: There is an OpenStack optimism in the market that is well-founded.

Why is Open Source Software interesting? I use here the term Open Source Software possibly somewhat casually, but I mean the strict definition of free software of the Free Software Foundation (1985).

What is important is that the software can be freely used, shared, studied and - very important! - can be modified: freedom to use, share, study and modify.

This is only possible with open source software. Here it is secondary whether you have to pay for the software somehow. The ambiguity of the English language - free, as in freedom, or free, as in free beer - does not strike in the German language anyway.

Access to the source code and the ability to modify can result in a product that can be on par with - and often superior to - commercial products in terms of functionality, integrability, stability, quality, robustness, and often scalability and availability.

Linux has thus matured into a very widespread operating system. Today, about three quarters of all servers in cloud installations run on Linux. Because good enough is good enough and because the community is trusted.

Why is OpenStack interesting?

OpenStack is an OSS cloud operating system and runtime environment. It is the largest and most ambitious OSS project apart from Linux.

A lot has been done right from the start, so both governance model and processes, the procedure for code reviews, integration testing, automation of all procedures, etc. are right.

This - coupled with the architectural advantages: Modularity, flexibility, incubation capability - leads to an enormous speed of innovation.

In this way, the weaknesses in scalability, availability, security, automation are gradually eradicated. This is also the reason why we at Fujitsu decided to take OpenStack as the basis for our next generation cloud platform.

We are active in the community and contribute to the evolution of OpenStack many enterprise features. OpenStack is sufficiently complete and robust for many use cases.

Why does all this matter to SAP?

OpenStack offers an attractive environment for higher layers of the stack: everything the cloud heart desires: virtualization (VM-s, Docker, Rocket), PaaS (Cloud Foundry), Big Data Platform (Hadoop), cluster management (Kubernetes, Mesos), orchestration (TOSCA), service catalogs (Murano), application monitoring (Monasca).

This can not only be delivered, but also operated. This also brings us into SAP domains. It is no coincidence that SAP itself is actively involved in quite a few of the OpenStack projects mentioned.

Particularly clear deployment options exist for the Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) or Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC).

It's not perfect yet, but OpenStack is barely five years old. SAP-specific capabilities (such as SAP application deployment, system cloning, accounting, application high availability) are not yet available.

However, the enormous potential for SAP (both for the software and for the company) is clearly visible: OpenStack on Linux can become the perfect SAP infrastructure.

The stack model of IT was invented for a reason. Sometimes you create full stacks, usually it is more beneficial if each company engages in parts of the stack.

Especially if the foundations and infrastructure have already been laid. The infrastructure develops over time and its own value creation usually shifts upwards. And at the bottom, in many cases, open source can take over. This is also true for SAP.

That fits soo!