SAP TechEd 2018: SAP Delivers Cloud-Native Services

These new features empower enterprises and developers with more business-focused tools to succeed in the digital economy. SAP Cloud Platform offers customers a fast transition to the cloud and opens up innovation potential. This announcement was made at the SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas.

“Our new SAP Cloud Platform capabilities are focused on accelerating the delivery of new business application functionality,” said Bjoern Goerke, chief technology officer at SAP.

Goerke added, “As a result, customers will be able to better serve their customers and innovate in their markets. SAP’s investment in open source, business services and other technologies will help developers. For example, in deploying innovative business applications and other game-changing apps to make their companies intelligent enterprises.”

New Cloud Business-Focused Development

• SAP Cloud Platform, Abap environment is now generally available. It makes it easy for Abap programmers to develop app extensions and new apps using the public cloud. Therefore, it empowers programmers to use existing Abap programming knowledge and skills to develop and extend critical business applications in the cloud using agile and DevOps methodologies and principles.
• The cloud application programming model for SAP Cloud Platform is an integrated framework of tools, languages and libraries. It is meant for developers to efficiently and rapidly build enterprise business services and applications. Therefore, it will guide developers with SAP-supported best practices for full-stack cloud business application development. Consequently, they can focus on their development project at hand. This includes:
  • Integrating open source software and SAP technologies into one consistent end-to-end programming model and development experience
  • Providing lightweight and modular implementation of core data services, allowing rapid development of persistency, business logic and user experience
  • Guiding developers with a set of enterprise-grade tools, languages and libraries, allowing them to stay focused on their domain logic

San Miguel, an Argentina-based citrus company, has created a mobile app that management and workers can use to plan, list, track and update grove activities. They used SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS for the development.

“With SAP Cloud Platform, we are delivering apps that eliminate paperwork and other manual processes,” said Eduardo Martinez, chief information officer of San Miguel. “Thus empowering our employees in the groves to record data immediately and helps us react to changes.”

New Cloud Business-Focused Deployment

SAP Cloud Platform is now delivering enterprise-ready, event-driven serverless business application deployment innovation. This includes three integrated services based on Kubernetes, Knative and Kubeless. With these new services, customers can reimagine and evolve crucial business processes into event-sensing applications:

• The SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging service accelerates innovation. It does this with scalable, event-based messaging, auto-activation and auto-scaling for applications. This service is now generally available.
• The SAP Cloud Platform Backend service, beta, is a fully managed data management service. It aims to generate robust, scalable and enterprise-ready APIs and services to serve application data needs in a real-time event-based environment. This service is planned to be generally available in 2019.
• The SAP Cloud Platform Functions service, beta, will provide the ability to create microservices. Consequently, the platform itself takes care of the implementation, running and scaling of the functions. It is planned to be generally available in 2019.

These services provide an easily consumed serverless environment and are billed as microservices. They are designed to speed deployment of event-based cloud applications.

“Enterprises build next-gen applications to support digital transformation of their business and workforce. Therefore, many are turning to adopt platform-as-a-service,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research.

Additionally, Mueller commented, “Open source standards-based platforms have become the choice for CxOs, with Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes as the most prominent winners. CxOs also want to see their teams existing skills leveraged, so the availability of programming languages that developers are comfortable and experienced with is a key advantage to PaaS platforms.”

New Cloud Business-Focused Lifecycle Management

Kubernetes as a service for SAP Cloud Platform, private beta, will offer customers the deployment option of containerized business application workloads in a Kubernetes environment.

As a result, customers will have flexibility and ease in building robust, container-based business applications that are easily deployed and managed in their public cloud of choice. This is planned to be generally available in 2019.