Today, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform reached another milestone: our data center in the US region went live (see releases notes)!
Our motivation to gain a foothold in the US where manyfold ranging from legal considerations to technical benefits. For legal and data privacy reasons, cloud platforms need to provide choice regarding the physical location of cloud applications being deployed by customers. With the new data center in place, customers can now freely decide whether they want to deploy their applications to our data center in Europe or US.
From a technical perspective, the most important benefit for going to the US is lower network latency in scenarios where the user of a cloud application is also located in the US. In the past, this required transatlantic communication and hence was suboptimal. Our measurements indicate that avoiding this transatlantic communication saves about 100ms for a single roundtrip. Depending on the protocol and the type of application being used this needs to be multiplied by the factor n.
One of the key scenarios that benefit from this US-based data center are extensions of SaaS applications from SuccessFactors. Given that these cloud applications and the applications that extend them may now be located in the very same building results in optimal performance as basically there's close to zero latency.
Here are more facts that may be of interest:
- US-based landscape is only available to customers.
- The Developer Edition accounts running on the free-of-charge trial landscape remain exclusively in Europe.
- The two landscapes are kept in sync, hence the bi-weekly updates of the platform are being released to both landscapes at the same day.
All URLs in US are the similar to the ones in Europe with the important difference that there is an additional ‘us1’ in the URL, https://account.us1.hana.ondemand.com leads you to the US Landing Page. From a developer's perspective this means that deploying an application to the US-based data center is as simple as specifying the corresponding hostname during deployment (given that the user has a
corresponding platform account.) For more information please visit our online help page about Deployment Landscapes
This step is the just the first milestone on our journey to increase our global footprint. More features and more locations are planned, stay tuned!
