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At the beginning of the year I posted a teaser on Twitter stating 2017 would be a BIG year for SAP

Cloud Platform and today finally the day has came that I no longer have to keep it a secret. Sure,
bits and pieces have leaked over time and I surely played an active part herein by providing you a
glimpse on whats coming when I blogged about the new name as well. But thats past us, so lets
talk about today
Today we officially announce the general availability of Cloud Foundry within SAP Cloud Platform
and in parallel rollout the multi-cloud architecture underneath! Certainly there are many more
announcements, yet in this blog post I want to focus on these two topics and refer you to Bjrn
Goerkes overarching blog post for the overall story.
Overview
Before we go into the details, let me set the stage and level the playing field. For that purpose lets
have a look at the traditional cloud model and explain SAPs strategy for SAP Cloud Platform.
Infrastructure / multi-cloud
Starting bottom up and hereby jumping right at it lets first talk about Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS). Lets be clear: SAP will continue to invest into its own infrastructure and to expand its global
data center footprint. Yet, in parallel we have signed strategic, long-term partnerships with the top
three hyper-scale cloud vendors: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
Platform. As a result, SAP is first to provide a multi-cloud enterprise cloud platform with free choice
of infrastructure. Not only does that lead to a much broader regional coverage of SAP Cloud
Platform data centers, it will also tremendously accelerate the future build-out of new data centers
based on customer demand. Finally, providing SAP Cloud Platform next to our customers other
cloud assets (e.g. data sets, services and applications) caters to so called co-location scenarios,
which benefit from reduced network latency, shared services and better integration possibilities.
PaaS / Enterprise cloud platform
Moving up one layer, we get to the other main talking point of this blog post: Cloud Foundry. Back
in late 2014 when SAP joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as co-founding platinum member we
set the tracks to incorporate this open-source project into SAP Cloud Platform. Given it has become
the de-facto standard in enterprise PaaS it was a no-brainer, and during the last couple of months
while the teams have been busy at work we launched a public BETA so that the developer
community could get acquainted with the technology in the meanwhile. Now, with the GA version
out, were sunsetting the BETA and replacing it with a new trial experience please check out
the respective blog post from my colleague Timo Lakner for all the details.
Lets save a closer look at the benefits of Cloud Foundry for later and talk about SAPs general
approach to PaaS first. In that light, we certainly want to move it to the next level beyond technical
capabilities. SAP Cloud Platform provides a comprehensive and steadily-growing set of platform
services and capabilities (40+ and counting), yet what truly sets it apart is the focus on higher-
level business services infused with machine learning intelligence. In fact, the whole set of
capabilities provided as part of SAP Leonardo is based and powered by the platform and its
capabilities. As such, SAP Cloud Platform is the technical foundation and underlying platform for
all digital transformation, integrationand agile business scenarios.
SaaS / LOB cloud solutions and integration
On the top, we have SaaS. Over the last couple of years SAPs portfolio of cloud solutions
(developed in-house or acquired) has continuously grown and the combination of SaaS + PaaS has
shown to be very successful and well-received by customers. This combination gives you the
desired standardisation and rapid deployment of SaaS, plus the flexibility to extend and integrate
your LoB solution as needed via PaaS. Especially in context of hybrid IT-landscapes with both on-
prem and cloud systems, this has proven to be a winning strategy. Needless to say that SAP will
continue down that path and SAP Cloud Platform is the designated extension platform for these
scenarios.
As Bjrn Goerke pointed out in his blog post, its absolutely crucial to treat platform holistically and
that implies treating ecosystem and marketplace as an integral part of the end-to-end platform
strategy. On that note, we have been taking it to the next level by enhancing the SAP API
Business Hub, the SAP App Center and the partner marketplace with new capabilities and content
respectively.
Now that we have elaborated on the broader strategy, lets have a closer look at how Cloud Foundry
fits in.

Cloud Foundry
Besides being the technical enabler for the multi-cloud architecture via Cloud Provider Interfaces
(CPI) there are numerous other benefits that we covered in detail in previous blog posts such
as The road ahead with SAP Cloud Platform and Cloud Foundry by Rui Nogueira.
For the sake of brevity of this blog post I wont reiterate on those again, but rather refer you to (re-
)visit Ruis comprehensive write-up.
In essence, incorporating Cloud Foundry in SAP Cloud Platform is a continuation of our open
platform strategy, which has always been a guiding principle for us. As you may recall, we started
with a Java-based runtime (referred to as Neo), then we added the built-in server-side Javascript
engine of SAP HANA (XS). Next, we introduced a HTML5 programming model and now we bring in
Cloud Foundry. Given the growing adoption of containers SAP is looking into this area and will
probably introduce additional environments over time. In fact, support for Docker is a built-in feature
of Cloud Foundry (via Diego) and available today and Bernd Leukert already announced our
plans to work with Google on Kubernetes at Google Cloud Next.
All of these environments complement each other and address specific use-cases. Based on the
feedback from the various SAP user groups we understand that many have extensive Java know-
how in-house. Thats why SAP started its cloud platform endeavor with Java, which still is by a fair
margin may I add the most widely used programming language in the enterprise space. Catering
to a more light-weight programming model for data-centric applications (think analytical dashboards
etc.) we introduced XS. For mash-ups and composite apps targeting casual users HTML5 apps are
a great approach as they provide an engaging user-experience via SAP UI5 and Fiori. And via the
support of (community) buildpacks within Cloud Foundry developers can now use their language of
choice!
In that context, we currently see Cloud Foundry primarily addressing the following focus areas: IoT
and machine learning scenarios (in conjunction with the broader SAP Leonardo portfolio) and HANA
native development using XSA. My colleague, Sven Kohlhaas, has written about the later in much
more detail. Please check-out his blog post(s) to get the full scoop.
(For more information on programming models please refer to the respective page on our website!)
The complete picture
A picture is worth a thousand words!; so lets have a look at how all of the above comes together.
I guess many of you have seen previous versions of that high-level architecture diagram, therefore
lets focus on the main additions we made to properly address the announcements made today.
As you can see we added the new infrastructure providers to reflect the multi-cloud architecture.
In the Data & Storage Services category we added Postgres, MongoDB as open-source
alternatives to SAP HANA or SAP ASE and Redis, which is commonly used for implementing a
distributed/shared cache for stateless applications. Furthermore, we added an Object Store for
unstructured data and RabbitMQ for publish & subscribe messaging purposes.
(Update: Please refer to this blog post for more details on the various data management options.)
On the programming model side, we introduce SAP HANA XSA (as mentioned above), Node.js and
Python plus the possibility to use any of the community-provided buildpacks. For more detailed
information on all these additions please refer to the dedicated Cloud Foundry page on our public
website.
What I really want to highlight though to is the top of this diagram: to facilitate and simplify the end-
to-end development, operation and commercialization, we provide unified access to all of SAP Cloud
Platform for each persona and role:

SAP Web IDE is the one development tool to rapidly develop new, exciting cloud
applications with ease.
SAP API Business Hub is the central place to discover & test-drive enterprise APIs,
microservices and integration content.
The new cockpit provides unified access to centrally manage the operations across apps,
services, environments and the underlying multi-cloud enabled infrastructure.
The SAP App Center is the one place to buy & sell cloud applications to our extensive
ecosystem.

Wrap-up
As you can see, all teams have really been hard at work the last couple of months to take SAP
Cloud Platform to the next level and deliver a unique, secure and portable enterprise cloud platform
that runs on top of all the industry leading infrastructure providers, all based on open standards and
open-source [REF]. I call myself privileged to be part of this team and very excited to hear your
thoughts and feedback!
One more thing while I tried my best to give you a run-down on all the exciting and note-worthy
additions and changes, theres soo much more and hence I encourage you to read more of the blog
posts my colleagues and I have been publishing today.
PS: Oh, and dont take our word for it, but see for yourself we offer a free developer trial, so see

for yourself!
Related material:
[1] SAP Cloud Platform A positive-sum game by Bjrn Goerke
[2] SAP Cloud Platform Trial experience by Timo Lakner
[3] A new seamless SAP Cloud Platform experience by Robert Wetzold
[4] General Availability of the XS Advanced Programming Model with Cloud Foundry on SAP Cloud
Platform by Sven Kohlhaas
[5] Announcing General Availability of SAP Web IDE, multi-cloud version by Elizabeth Gutt
[6] Data Management on SAP Cloud Platform: New Environment; New Capabilities by Manjunath
Baburao

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