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 8.5 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
