Discovering Cloud Terminology

Cloud computing can lower your costs by allowing you to use only the resources you need on demand. You don't need to build a big data center in your office for scalability and high availability. You don't need to reserve an amount of computing resources in case you need it for a prototyping project, or for a temporary higher load on your system. Cloud computing offerings are available in different deployment models and service models. In addition to that, cloud landscapes are clustered over several regions to ensure higher availability and lower latency. With the increasing amount of cloud capabilities, the importance of virtualization and container technologies is becoming even more relevant than ever before. Out in the market, there are a lot of providers, also called vendors, for several cloud offerings. SAP is focusing on the transformation to the cloud.

In the intelligent, sustainable enterprise, the system landscapes are more diverse than ever before. You can combine multiple products from several vendors from private cloud, public cloud, or even on premise. It doesn't matter whether it's infrastructure, a platform, or software-as-a-service, they are all on demand. You can combine and integrate them to each other through the concept of multi-cloud. SAP is also supporting the approach of multi-cloud. That means you can combine software from different regions, deployment models, and you can combine SAP software with software from a third party.

The well known hyperscalers are AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud. Of course, next to them, there are even more cloud providers that might have hyperscaler approached architectures. SAP partners with the four previously mentioned big hyperscalers to achieve the best offering for the customers and the highest availability. This collaboration is across several products, but SAP BTP is the most interesting one in the scope of hyperscalers.

SAP BTP is available in several regions with these providers. SAP supports multi-cloud landscapes through this. The providers themselves may differ in up-time availability, service offerings, or latency from data centers. SAP, in collaboration with the hyperscalers, offers data centers in the following regions: Europe, US East, US West, Singapore, and many more.

SAP, of course, also operates software in its own data centers without using hyperscaler capabilities. These data centers are built with a hyperscaler-like architecture to be more resilient and flexible for scaling and high availability.

Whether a SAP solution is running on SAP data centers or hyperscaler resources depends on the product and its architecture.