ORLANDO, Fla. – SAP is a big booster of the Kubernetes ecosystem, but it has no interest in launching its own hosted Kubernetes distribution, instead preferring to tap into already established platforms offered by large cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Dan Lahl, vice president of product marketing at SAP, explained that the company was not interested in competing against already established Kubernetes distributions offered by the cloud giants. “We will not offer Kubernetes as a service,” he said, adding that, “we will work with the hyperscalers to run their Kubernetes deployments.”

SAP instead is focused further up the stack. “In year’s past we would have tried to do that ourselves,” Lahl said. “Kubernetes is a great and awesome project. But we are making our bets closer to the application layer.”

The vendor does use its Gardener project to manage Kubernetes clusters at scale and has submitted that project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a possible hosted project. Gardener is a way to thin out Kubernetes-based container replicas.

“When you scale to a lot of clusters with Kubernetes today it gets sort of heavy with all of the Kubernetes components you need today,” Lahl said. “[Gardener] allows you to scale to thousands and tens of thousands of clusters” without having that weighty baggage.

Lahl did note that most of SAP’s work with Kubernetes is through its work with the Cloud Foundry Foundation and its Cloud Foundry platform. “Everything Cloud Foundry does we get,” he said. “We view them as the bottom half of our services to go multicloud.”

The Cloud Foundry Foundation recently made a big move toward the Kubernetes community through the launch of the Eirini Project. That project acts as a bridge between Cloud Foundry’s legacy Diego container management system and the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

Lahl said that the Cloud Foundry Foundation “saw the light” by moving closer to the Kubernetes community, and that the tighter integration of Eirini was “really the only decision that made sense.”

SAP also remains a board member at both the Cloud Foundry Foundation and CNCF. Some have noted that those two organizations, which are both part of the Linux Foundation, are starting to serve overlapping roles that could see a closer combination of the two groups at some point.

“It will be interesting to see the dance those two organizations make,” Lahl noted, adding that both foundation’s share office space on the same floor at the Linux Foundation headquarters in San Francisco.

While SAP keeps its Kubernetes efforts at arms-length, it remains very active in the Kubernetes-based Knative ecosystem. This ties in with SAP’s focus on the developer community.

“For us, Knative is below the water line,” Lahl said. “The developer sees just the Kubeless functions that they write.”

SAP was one of the founding members of the Knative project when it launched last summer. It provides an open source set of components that allows for the building and deployment of container-based serverless applications that can be transported between cloud providers. This allows the platform to act as the “infrastructure” layer for the deployment of functions-as-a-service (FaaS) similar to how Kubernetes is being used as the infrastructure layer for broader network applications.

And that focus higher up the stack will also see SAP continue to tap into the open source community.

“It’s awesome to embrace open source so that we can do the free stuff closer to the application layer,” Lahl said. “The things that are closer to the developers are what we want to do in open source. The ones closer to the application layer is where we are going to put our money and embrace.”