CloudFoundry is a free, open source cloud computing platform supported by the non-profit CloudFoundry. It is not tied to any particular cloud service, but can be self-hosted or run on any cloud service preferred.
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SAP Business Technology Platform
Score 8.4 out of 10
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SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the company's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, that brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.
We have used the plain cloud foundry variant also, and there were many problems we faced while running applications on cloud foundry. We have also used the GCP platform to run our applications here also faced many problems. SAP BTP services and integration of service are strong …
SAP Business Technology Platform offers to run the cloud application without worries about availability and accessibility. This is helping us to enable the services that are really suited for us. For example, We have Cloud Identity Services that offer the capability to manage identity directory and also Identity provisioning functionality. Both functionalities helped us to manage the SSO and also enabled the auto-provisioning.
Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization.
Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs.
Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance.
Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources.
SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running.
Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs.
Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze.
Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings.
Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications.
Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints)
Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time
Services are operated by SAP with outstanding support, always giving a helping hand even if it is custom code or solution provided on the platform
Services are easily connectable via standard approach to our backend SAP systems in SAP Rise/HEC
Secure access using identities from our existing identity management helping us to safeguard data security from within SAP systems up to custom frontend applications
Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have.
Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana.
Seamless integration with external system and dashboard to monitor the data flow and analysis are very essential for the business. The way the product is designed and modelled lead to minimum business disruptions. Adopting to the new and modern technology was easy. Keeping the central system as clean and adopting project bases development are advantages.
Overall, I feel it is build toward as an SAP centric platform. Which is very proper direction for SAP as it is their competitive advantage. However, as a customer, I like to see the cost of the services to come down with the advance of underlay hardware capabilities. Licensing model can be streamlined for easier budgeting and consumption.
I give it 9/10 because its customer support team is responsive and knowledgeable, providing clear guidance on complex issues. We contacted them several times; I want to give one example. When we had a problem with third-party integration, we reached out to them about the issue, and they provided a tailored solution for this.
Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.
1. Sometimes the licensing doesn’t make sense, e.g., Difficult to understand the license for ABAP cloud runtime. 2. When SAP Business Technology Platform workflow cost is very high but process automation which offers more features has less cost.
While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services. Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.
SAP Concur allows our staff to book, reimburse and remain spend audit compliant. Our Concur system takes feed from Workday and interacts with Credit card vendor. It also makes posting to Accounting and does clearing. SAP Business Technology Platform helped in establishing connection with all these different tools in real time. It helps in getting paid to the card service provider through our Bank through interface, which is built on SAP Business Technology Platform.
Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations.
Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins.
Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify.
Infusing Generative AI capabilities easily into our solutions with existing talent with minimal learning curve, has been very impactful. We have been able resolve several challenges for our clients with AI capabilities, that we could not, previously.
Integration Suite is quite extensive in capabilities for bringing together the IT landscape into a single ecosystem.
