Introducing the SAP HANA Cloud Architecture

The SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database is a cloud-native platform that reduces the complexity of multi-cloud or hybrid system landscapes. SAP HANA Cloud provides all of the known advanced SAP HANA on-premises technologies for multimodel data processing in-memory or on disk with the benefits of the cloud.

Comparing SAP HANA Cloud with SAP HANA on-prem shows that many administrative tasks are handled as a managed service by the cloud provider. In SAP HANA Cloud, the following administrative tasks are handled by the cloud provider:

• Selection, purchase, and provisioning of servers and storage.
• Installing, configuring, backing up, and upgrading the operating system.
• Installing, configuring, and patching the database software.
• Backing up, restoring, and recovering the database software.
• Tuning the database to run optimal on the underlying operating system and hardware.

As a database administrator, you're still in control, and you can deploy new SAP HANA database instances with the required RAM, CPU, and disk resources whenever you need them. The big advantage is you don't need to go through the whole hardware buying, configuring, and software installation process.

The automated processes within SAP HANA Cloud ensure that the SAP HANA database, with the required hardware resources, is available within minutes instead of weeks or sometimes months.

Database patching is fully automated and is reduced to a stop and a start of the SAP HANA database. The timing of when the database patch is applied is fully controlled by the database administrator.

The SAP HANA Cloud provides the database and data management service to SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP Business Applications, and third-party applications.

Within SAP HANA Cloud, you've the choice between several storage options. The storage options are:

• SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database: A powerful in-memory database system combining OLTP + OLAP technologies, complemented with a multimodel engine for relational and document data.

• SAP HANA Cloud, data lake: A market-leading analytics data platform, providing high-performance, on demand analytics, supporting customers with timely, data-driven insight.

SAP BTP is using the SAP multi-cloud foundation as a basis. With SAP BTP, you can also choose which hyperscaler infrastructure to use.

The SAP HANA Cloud is build on top of SAP's multi-cloud foundation and runs inside a Kubernetes container.

Hint

What is Kubernetes: Kubernetes is a cluster management system for container orchestration that allows you to manage and control your containerized applications. The name Kubernetes originates from Greek and means helmsman or pilot.

Kubernetes is based on Google's Borg cluster management system and was open-sourced by Google in 2014 as Kubernetes. In the Kubernetes world, you'll often see the term Kubernetes abbreviated to K8s.

For more information, visit the Kubernetes website: https://kubernetes.io/

Hint

What is a Container: Containers are very similar to virtual machines (VMs), but there are significant differences. For example, containers share the host operating system and run on top a container runtime, whereas VMs run on top of a hypervisor and have their own guest operating system . Therefore, containers are considered more lightweight then VMs.

For more information on Kubernetes and containers, visit the Kubernetes/contrainers website: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/containers/

The SAP BTP multi-environment is built around the following three environments:

• Cloud Foundry environment: The Cloud Foundry environment allows you to create polyglot cloud applications in Cloud Foundry and is based on the Cloud Foundry Open Source Cloud Application Platform.

  Cloud Foundry is an open source, industry standard platform as a service (PaaS) technology for developing and deploying cloud applications in both private and public cloud environments. It’s designed to run on a variety of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It uses a container-based architecture that executes applications in any programming language and lets you choose from different runtimes and backing services.

  SAP is a platinum-level founding member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which oversees the development of Cloud Foundry software and its ecosystem. To provide an open and portable platform to run and manage web-based applications and services in a cloud environment, it has adopted the open source Cloud Foundry technology as basis for its SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment. You can use it to enhance SAP products and integrate business applications, as well as to develop entirely new enterprise applications based on business APIs.

  For more information, see the Cloud Foundry project website: https://www.cloudfoundry.org/

• Kyma environment: The Kyma environment is a runtime you can use to build cloud-native Kubernetes-based extensions.

  It's a fully managed Kubernetes runtime based on the open source project Kyma, which lets you extend SAP solutions with serverless functions and combine them with containerized microservices. It ensures the smooth consumption of both SAP and non-SAP applications by running workloads in a highly scalable environment and building event-based and API-based extensions.

  Every Kyma environment consists of:

  • A Kubernetes cluster provisioned on a cloud provider and region (data center) of your choice.
  • The open-source project Kyma installed in its latest version on the provisioned cluster.

  For more information, see the Kyma project website: https://kyma-project.io/

• SAP BTP ABAP environment: The SAP BTP ABAP environment is the platform as a service for ABAP developers. A cloud-optimized ABAP platform, based on SAP HANA, serves as a development and runtime environment for cloud apps using the service framework of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

  For more information, see the SAP BTP ABAP environment website: https://community.sap.com/topics/btp-abap-environment

In this lesson, you've learned about the underlying technology of SAP HANA Cloud. You now know which services that the cloud provider manages. You also have now a basic understanding of the technologies used in the SAP Business Technology Platform.