The SAP Cloud platform provides two operating environments: Cloud Foundry and Neo

As can be seen from the figure below, the operating environment and infrastructure of Cloud Foundry are provided by third-party companies, such as Amazon and Microsoft, while SAP is only responsible for providing and maintaining platform Layer. The Neo environment’s infrastructure and platform layer are provided by SAP.

The Cloud Foundry Runtime includes the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, which is built on the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s open source application platform.

A specific comparison of the two environments:

Compare from usage scenarios

SAP recommends the Cloud Foundry runtime environment if you need to develop applications based on microservices architecture, using Internet of Things or machine learning scenarios. In the Cloud Foundry runtime environment you can use a variety of programming models, such as Java, NodeJS and SAP HANA Extended Application Services, Advanced Model (SAP HANA XSA).

Neo is used for UI5, Java, and HANA Extended Service development.

Compare from available regions

As you can see from the two images above, Neo has a wider area of availability than Cloud Foundry. Note Region refers to the physical address of the data center. As developers, we try to use regions close to our physical substances to achieve better performance when developing.

Compare from the supported BuildPack

Cloud Foundry supports the following buildPack and even custom BuildPack, while Neo does not.

Maximum memory quota that an application instance can allocate

Cloud Foundry is 4GB and Neo is 16GB

Support for HANA programming model

Neo only supports the classic model of SAP HANA Extended Application Services (SAP HANA XS), while Cloud Foundry supports the advanced model (SAP HANA XS).

Virtual machine support

Neo provides virtual machine support to allow you to install and maintain the applications you need even when the platform does not support them. Cloud Foundry does not support virtual machines.

Docker support

Cloud Foundry supports Docker, Neo does not.

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