While SAP is known for enterprise-grade software, its research arm SAP Labs is looking for ways to bring the company, and its customers, to cloud-native architectures. Not surprisingly, SAP Labs is taking a hard look at the Kubernetes as a potential deployment tool for SAP applications, running both in-house and in the cloud.
On this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, SAP Cloud Architecture and Engineering Division Director Nishi Davidson spoke with TNS managing editor Joab Jackson, during KubeCon 2016, to discuss how SAP views the future Kubernetes in production.
"Frankly speaking, we are used to the world of VMs. We are used to the traditional way of running infrastructure with an orchestration tool that is traditionally operated in primary data centers. As I got introduced to Kubernetes, it became very obvious that there is a clear difference in the way which Kubernetes is architected, it is based on operating infrastructure as a thing that does not need to be maintained and taken care of as a pet," said Davidson.
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In working with the open source community, SAP Labs found much-needed support to bring its latest project to life. During a series of demos at KubeCon, Davidson and colleague Victoria Rozhina demonstrated how SAP microservices could be deployed across multiple cloud platforms using Kubernetes, CoreOS, and Docker.
As the conversation wound down, Davidson went on to note that while she understands the struggle today's enterprises may face when looking to move to the cloud from a legacy environment. But the sooner that they can do so, the better off they will be, she asserted. Not only will one's infrastructure become more efficient, there are also potentially significant costs savings when one migrates their stack to the cloud.
"It's a huge challenge to containerize your application, but the faster you move the better it would be in terms of moving away from traditional legacy environments that actually are super expensive. You don't have to change hardware, and your software costs can be reduced so much it's unbelievable," she said.
CoreOS and Docker are sponsors of The New Stack. Cisco sponsored this podcast.