AppFog (discontinued) vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

It was very good to use in small scale projects. Considering the high end projects with many instances and multi-platform architectures, it is better to test before the application is deployed. I think few of the questions can be general - who are the system users and what size is the application focussing on? How much resources are required? Will the application require any additional services?

Incentivized

SAP Business Technology Platform is highly suitable for AI agentic development, particularly when workflows require dynamic orchestration, modular service integration, and real-time decisioning. However, it may be less effective in environments where backend services are fully encapsulated and do not expose interfaces or events that SAP Business Technology Platform can interact with—limiting its ability to orchestrate or extend those services meaningfully.

Incentivized

• Quick deployment of pre-built virtual machines
• Some of the virtual machines also are readily available with a pack of softwares
• Good Stability. Using it as a student, I have never experienced any downtime issues with the projects deployed on AppFog.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Though it is good and easy for developers, it lacks operational activities and monitoring tools.
• It is easy to deploy WAR on AppFog with its console but sometimes it can lack on the performance and feasibility.

Incentivized

• For IAG, if there are multiple roles it can be overwhelming from an UX standpoint.
• Controlling and identifying shadow user creation is not as intuitive.
• Unlocking admin rights to an environment seems very easy if having elevated permissions, this seems like something that should have more controls rather than being able to unlock admin rights yourself.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Okay, so the content that we have built on the platform is limited to specific testing on the iFlows within integration suite. The visualization layer is nice to use and helps with the design elements, however with developers that are more used to markup languages, it doesn't have the same CLI type feel when you want it. Perhaps the majority of users are that deep, but other platforms have a better CLI type developer experience.

Incentivized

The biggest problem we ran into was communication between SAP Business Technology Platform and onsite resources. Unfortunately our SAP Business Technology Platform and Cloud systems are under different customer numbers. I constantly had to open tickets under each customer number because I was unsure of where the issue lied. And having to create a dummy ticket for our ECC systems to open the ECC connections for another ticket under the Cloud customer is a pain.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Having a full cloud native environment for devlopment of microservices and digitals solutions while having standardized access to our core data on SAP via cloud connector is one of the main benefits of using BTP over others hypervisors. BTP is the standard hyperscaler as soon as something relies on data from SAP systems in our company now

Incentivized

Primarily because it used to have a good free tier earlier, which it does not anymore. It's simple, and things are available to use. Compared to it's competitors, it does has less features, but that kind of acts in its favor. That adds to the simplicity, and ease of use for a new user.

Incentivized

Initially, SAP Business Technology Platform works hand in hand with S/4 HANA and the SAP product suite, but also can go and extra mile and integrate with other non-SAP products and services at hand. It's capable enough to understand the ERP use cases component and develop intelligent applications to satisfy the users.

Incentivized

• Our project was deployed with good efficiency and easily accessible.
• The platform was much recommeded across the groups and peers.

Incentivized

• Still using traditional devops instead of using build. Very high cost in development.
• Still using Node.js instead of REST ABAP. Additional cost of resources. Migration of current CAP to RAP will be costly and do not have a business case yet. Continue with multi-language is costly.
• Integration suite is power but the migration from PIPO to IS has been more challenging than being advertised.

Incentivized