Why SAP Wants to Back These Open Source Projects for Kubernetes
SAP may be one of the world’s largest proprietary software companies, but it is highly committed to supporting the open source community and the development of Kubernetes.
To whit, the Kubernetes Project’s Community Sizing and Health Assessment Dashboard, SAP ranked among the top 10 committers to Kubernetes in 2019. SAP was also the sixth-largest contributor to Knative in 2019, according to the Knative Annual Report. Those contributions represent a sample of SAP’s commitment to open source and to offer solutions to its customers so they can leverage Kubernetes at an enterprise scale.
Why Has SAP Chosen to Invest in Kubernetes?
As SAP’s customers move to the cloud, offering solutions that facilitate that transition drove the company to look into Kubernetes and its potential to help underpin the interoperability of the different tools and services that are involved. With Kubernetes, SAP is able to offer solutions that can be easily adopted and able to operate at an enterprise scale across public, private and hybrid cloud settings. SAP’s contributions have mainly focused on the Service Catalog, messaging and eventing.
Provision Cloud Services with the Service Catalog
The Kubernetes incubation project Service Catalog lets you provision cloud services directly from the comfort of native Kubernetes tooling, regardless of where the service is actually hosted. The end-goal of the service-catalog project is to provide a way for Kubernetes users to consume services from brokers and easily configure their applications to use those services, without needing detailed knowledge about how the services are created or managed. SAP is actively contributing to this project and is a part of the Service Catalog Special Interest Group (SIG).
Learn more about how the Service Catalog works and try a walkthrough on the Service Catalog website.
Connect Open Source and Cloud Native Tools with Project Kyma
Kyma is an SAP-driven open source project that sits on top of Knative and enables application developers to consume third-party services via the Open Service Broker catalog while providing seamless connectivity to enterprise systems. It provides a platform for extending applications with serverless functions and microservices by acting as a “glue” to stick several open source and cloud native tools together. It also offers an alternative to the Kafka-based eventing implementation within Knative for instances when the resource consumption of the Kafka implementation is greater than anticipated: the Kyma event bus, a NATS Streaming-based eventing solution.
Learn how Netconomy is leveraging Kyma to build a large e-commerce solution in this blog post, which outlines the context for the company’s use of Kyma, how they implemented it and their plans for the future.
Manage Kubernetes Clusters at Scale with Project Gardener
As demand for clusters grows, so does the need for tools to manage those clusters. Although hyperscalers offer their own cluster management tools, Gardener addresses the need to manage thousands of clusters across multiple infrastructures in a homogeneous way. It’s a tool that allows clusters to be managed in one place (no matter where they are operated), with a high degree of automation. Gardener is another SAP-driven open source project that was originated by the company’s own need to manage it’s growing demand for Kubernetes clusters.
Learn about the workloads and scenarios where Gardener is being used by companies by clicking here.
Aside from choosing Kubernetes and utilizing it for an increasing number of cloud applications, SAP has quite a long history of contributing to open source projects across a range of topics. One frequent goal of these contributions has been to better support enterprise-scale usage of open source tools in an effort to make cloud native more accessible to customers and companies that already have enterprise workloads, need the flexibility and benefits of cloud computing and need to be able to operate at an enterprise scale from day one with the expectation of the stability and reliability they are used to from their on-premise experiences.
Scale is just one part of the story. Building tools that are based on open source principles are also very important. The ability to discuss, decide and implement the future versions of open source tools, like Kubernetes and related projects, is important for SAP as it ensures that de facto standards are established helping underpin the interoperability of different tools and services.
For more information about SAP’s open source activities and to contribute to projects, visit opensource.sap.com.
