Enterprises are undergoing a digital transformation. Today, IT professionals and CIOs need native cloud solutions so their businesses and applications can have the flexibility and agility to support this transformation. For businesses to succeed, SAP already provides the fastest, most reliable in-memory solution. And now, SAP offers this solution for cloud consumption with the SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA service.
What is the SAP HANA service?
SAP HANA service on SAP Cloud Platform is SAP’s database as a service solution with SAP HANA at its center. The full force of SAP HANA has a new home in the cloud with new subscription-based and consumption-based pricing models for adaptability and ease of use. With the SAP HANA service, we want our users to focus purely on consuming and leveraging SAP HANA and its potential for transforming the digital enterprise. Users are no longer burdened with the tasks of provisioning, deploying, and operating HANA; that now resides with SAP.
For the best possible performance, the SAP HANA service was built on containers using virtualized storage, network, and infrastructure. This was key to bringing the full potential of SAP HANA to a native cloud environment. The SAP HANA service is available on multiple cloud hyperscale providers through the Cloud Foundry environment. Users may use the SAP HANA service with the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider of their choice.
Operations and maintenance for the SAP HANA service is handled by the SAP HANA product team. This includes provisioning SAP HANA instances of flexible sizes, administrating those instances, and providing automated backup and restore functionalities. The SAP HANA service employs all the leading-edge technologies that SAP HANA offers. Users of the service may now entirely focus on using SAP HANA for their innovative business solutions, while removing the burden of operating SAP HANA deployments.
The SAP HANA service offers on-demand flexibility and elasticity. You can start small, and as your business and data needs grow, your SAP HANA service can grow with it. Use what you need, for as long as you need it.
With the SAP HANA service, expect to have the same security standards as all SAP products with additional provisions put in place by your preferred third-party cloud providers. The SAP HANA service is tightly managed and monitored, so your data stays secure. And, of course, the SAP HANA service is fully GDPR compliant.
How is the SAP HANA service different from SAP HANA?
The short answer is, SAP HANA service on SAP Cloud Platform runs exactly like any other on-premise SAP HANA deployment. To showcase this, I will walk through a simple Python project. You will need an SAP HANA service instance on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform to follow along. For some guidance on creating your first instance, follow the instructions on SAP Cloud Platform or the hands-on videos provided by the SAP HANA Academy.
Connect to the SAP HANA service using Python.
If you want to run a Python script from your personal machine, copy the database endpoint from the SAP HANA Service Dashboard in the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit, and take a note of the port number at the end. Just like you would for any other SAP HANA server, you need this information to connect to your SAP HANA service installation.
Before you can connect, ensure that Python and the SAP HANA clients are installed on the machine you are connecting from.
To begin, create a new document called test-connect.py. Copy the following and replace the bracketed information in the connection line with your SAP HANA service system information.
Your connection was successful, and now you’re ready to create fully-fledged applications or transfer over any existing SAP HANA solutions and deploy them with the cloud consumption model of SAP HANA service.
If you found that process to be familiar, that’s because it is; it’s exactly the same as previous versions of the SAP HANA service and other SAP HANA installations. Except this time, SAP took care of operations on the backend, so you can focus on connecting and creating applications to take full advantage of SAP HANA.
Why use the SAP HANA service?
I’ve already mentioned that the SAP HANA service allows you to focus on generating insights from SAP HANA. This enables your organizations to be more agile by reducing your product’s time to market with faster innovation cycles. Even if you have other instances of SAP HANA, the SAP HANA service is compatible with on-premise and other SAP HANA cloud deployments, so you don’t need to worry about where your data is stored.
The agility and flexibility that comes with the SAP HANA service fully enables you to utilize S/4 and Business Suite framework extensions in the cloud alongside SAP Leonardo and hybrid transaction/analytical processing solutions. You can quickly develop and deploy agile data marts, while we innovate on the service side by leveraging emerging technologies such as Kubernetes for increasing reliability. Furthermore, the latest innovations made for SAP HANA will be released for the SAP HANA service before SAP HANA on-premise installations, so you will experience SAP’s newest features first in the cloud.
Deploying the SAP HANA service is easy. Currently, you can find the SAP HANA service on the SAP Cloud Platform. It is powered through Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform, with support for all major hyperscale cloud providers to come. With TechEd Barcelona behind us, expect to see some exciting updates from me and the future of SAP HANA as a service. The digital transformation is here, and you can stay ahead with the SAP HANA service.