SAP Cloud Platform - a Cloud Foundry Certified Pla...

manjunath_b · ‎2020 Apr 17

Cloud Foundry Certified Platforms

In the year after its creation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation announced a certification program for providers, with a goal to support application portability across certified Cloud Foundry–based products and services.

The certification requires that the provider adheres to a set of technical and non-technical requirements. At its core, the program aims at making sure that all certified platforms use the same core Cloud Foundry open-source components, unmodified. Thus, developers familiar with working on one certified offering will find themselves right at home when using another certified platform. This ensures standardization of the well known Cloud Foundry developer experience across the ecosystem.

SAP & Cloud Foundry Certification

As a founding Platinum member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, SAP immediately added Cloud Foundry to its open platform-as-a-Service offering - SAP Cloud Platform.

As a testament to our commitment towards Cloud Foundry and to deliver an open public cloud platform, it was announced that SAP would also participate in the certification program. SAP Cloud Platform earned the Cloud Foundry platform certification in the year 2016.

Besides broadening the developer base that can start using the Cloud Foundry environment right away, we see an Open Source standard establishing around Platform-as-a-Service with Cloud Foundry as it’s incarnation as a valuable thing to happen. One fundamental part of establishing such a standard is making sure that things called Cloud Foundry are Cloud Foundry and certification is a great way to achieve this goal.

Over the years not much has changed in terms of our attitude towards the certification program. With every consecutive year, we have consistently passed the certification requirements and continue to offer a Cloud Foundry Certified Platform ever since the program was announced.

Cloud Foundry in SAP Cloud Platform

Today, the Cloud Foundry environment on SAP Cloud Platform serves as the foundation for our Multi-Cloud Strategy. Using Cloud Foundry technology and partnering with leading hyper-scale infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, and Alibaba Cloud, SAP Cloud Platform has been able to rapidly achieve global reach with its 15+ (and counting) data centers.

With the Cloud Foundry environment, developers on SAP Cloud Platform have

the flexibility to choose infrastructure provider and region which works best for them, choose the programming language/framework (Java, Node.js, Python, Go..) based on their preference and skill.

the freedom to choose services external to the platform and integrate it with applications using well-known standards like Open Service Broker (OSB) API.

the advantage of enjoying increased platform reliability promised by hyper-scale infrastructure providers built with years of experience.

the possibility to speed up development using the abstraction and superior developer experience Cloud Foundry brings.

Of course, since the creation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation in 2014, SAP has come a long way in adopting Cloud Foundry technology into the mainstream:

SAP continues to actively contribute to the Cloud Foundry codebase.

As part of the SAP Cloud Platform, we run some of the largest Cloud Foundry deployments world-wide, on a wide range of hyperscaler infrastructures all across the globe.

A broad set of SAP, as well as customer-developed solutions, use SAP Cloud Platform, Cloud Foundry environment as their basis.

Together with our partners from the Cloud Foundry Foundation, SAP has been driving the evolution of Cloud Foundry with its move towards Kubernetes.

In specific, regarding the last bullet point, we are looking forward to enabling the Cloud Foundry user experience in even more scenarios than what is possible today.

So if you are a developer looking to get started with Cloud Foundry or a Cloud Foundry veteran looking to move away from your current platform, try out SAP Cloud Platform and our Cloud Foundry environment here.

Discover the platform capabilities using gamified missions with the SAP Cloud Platform Discovery Centre.

You will surely love it!