We want to give you an overview about our favorite services, we did subscribe to within the last customer projects. Especially in the cloud section things are changing – all the time.
The only constant in life is change
Heraclitus
So keep in mind: Maybe the name, functionalities or pictures do change quite often (nothing new for SAP customers) and therefore, use this post to get some inspiration, what you can do with services on the Business Technology Platform (named before as Cloud Platform).
Cloud Process Integration (CPI)
On a Business Technology Platform, this is the heart of every integration project. The most customer added value you’ll find here. Within this product you’ll be able to set up custom APIs and integration flows (iFlows) to connect things on your cloud environment (e.g. SAP S/4 HANA) within your local environment. Or you’re using it to connect services with each other or to prepare data for custom FIORI UI5 applications you’re running at your Cloud Foundry environment on SCP.
API Management (APIM)
Orchestration service for all your APIs. This could be the easiest translation for this one. But it’s more than just the ability to orchestrate. It provides you opportunities to add policies to your proxies, analyze and monetize the calls from your consumers.
We’re using it to orchestrate the consumption of APIs from internal applications (e.g. UI5-Apps). Every App gets an specific unique pair of credentials and all relevant APIs are whitelisted for these credentials. Within this approach, you’re able to identify which app is using which API and you can easy administer and orchestrate both sites – Apps & API or Consumer & Target.
Business Rules Management (BRM)
“Okay, so this is a table on SE11, starting with ‘Z’, right?” – It’s the easiest way to understand the use case for this service, by trying to understand how you did it the on-premise-way. You need some place to store your custom logic and values.
Think about some posting-logic for journal entries. So you have 3 types for expenses. Each of them results in another preset of fields for the journal entry posting. But where to store this combinations now? On your iFlow of your CPI?
Using the BRM service allows you to store your decision-tables on one central place. Reading your rules by a REST API allows you easy to integrate this service within your cloud landscape and other services.
Serverless Runtime
This is really proud to be on our favorite list. He’s shy and young and feels uncomfortable to stay around the big ones – but honestly: He’s cute. This service is cheap and provides you the ability to run custom build small microservices (or even ‘big’ UI5 applications) without your own runtime. It’s running on a kubernetes cluster (so it’s serverless).
We did use this service to provide small microservices, who are not getting called this often and therefore, do not need their own runtime. You’ll pay this service only, if the hooks / API / application you did deploy to the serverless service is getting called. So this could be useful for validation services, or jobs, you did implement to do things once a day.
At least we did use it to provide short functions, who’re doing something on your environment or just calculating stuff. That’s also the reason why it’s getting called “Function-as-a-Service” (FaaS). So a lot of names for this cute service.
Check out this personal review about the “Serverless” service on SAP Community:
More to discover!
Let us help you finding your favorite services, configuring and connecting these services with each other and enable a cloud environment on BTP, clever and well-designed as its best. Get in contact with us to get some more inspiration and find a way working together.