SAP HCI Blog Series: Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

[Former Member]

In the first introductory blog available via the link below;

(http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/cloud-platform/blog/2013/06/24/sap-moving-integration-...);

I highlighted the power of SAP HCI and its functionalities. It is with pleasure I am updating the community on the technical aspects of getting hands-on experience with SAP HCI. I am starting a blog in which I will describe all the necessary steps needed to set up the appropriate environment and the technical implementation required to get started with SAP HCI.

Part 1; Understanding the Power of SAP HCI: Getting Started

In this first blog, I will describe the necessary steps needed to set up SAP HCI environment for modeling and configuration;

SAP HCI Workbench and Tools

To get started, this section describes the tools to set up SAP HCI.

Eclipse: The first tool necessary is Eclipse Juno 4.4.2, this contains the integrated development environment – IDE and necessary perspectives that supports SAP HCI development. Other eclipse platforms currently do not provide support for SAP HCI. Eclipse Juno can be downloaded from the link below.

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/release/juno/sr2

SAP HCI Plugins:  The appropriate plugins to be installed in Eclipse Juno can be accessed from the link below. This contains the necessary artifacts for creating, designing and for monitoring Integration Flows (iFlow).

https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/#hci

Certificates and security Artifacts: Designing and deploying integration flow on SAP HCI tenant requires security and, depending on the type of scenario, different security artifacts. To generate SSL (Certificate Authority, Private Key, Public Key) and SSH (Private and Public Keys), the links below are also useful.

SSH Key pair (Private and Public):

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/XI/Generating+SSH+Keys+for+SFTP+Adapters+-+Type+1

NB: This is specific for a sFTP scenario

SSL CA, Private, and Public Keys (SAP Logon required) using SAP Passport CA:

A link to retrieve the certificates (SAP Passport CA) can be accessed if you or your organization has the S-number to access SAP Marketplace.

NB: Other types of CAs are also possible apart from the SAP Passport CA.

Since SAP HCI currently supports three connectivity options (SOAP, IDOC, SFSF and SFTP), the security artifacts are pretty much the same, but there are different options of certificate authorities presently supported by SAP which could be used to sign the SSL certificate. SAP provides an overview of the supported CA’s in the current release of SAP HCI.

Tenant Account: A tenant account is required which is provided by SAP, this provides the tenant ID and the operations server to be configured in eclipse on which the Integration Flows (iFlows) will be deployed on. For more information about how to apply for a tenant account, please contact your SAP representative or send me an e-mail.

SOAP UI 4.0.1: SOAP UI is a lite weight tool to test the scenarios. How to use this tool is described in Part 3 of this blog. To download SOAP UI, use the following link:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/soapui/files/

This conclude the first part of this series of blogs. I just went through the requirements necessary to set up a modeling platform for SAP HCI scenarios. In the next part I will describe how to implement a SOAP2SOAP scenario via SAP HCI, watch out for part two of this blog.

Written By; Abidemi Olatunbosun, Rojo Consultancy BV, The Netherlands

Contributor; Geert van den Reek, Rojo Consultancy BV, The Netherlands