Lightweight Fiori deployment to the HANA Cloud Platform with River RDE

So far, the Fiori applications had been mostly meant to be deployed on premise. While you could have deployed them to the cloud by hosting the ABAP Front-End Server in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud or on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure via the Cloud Appliance Library, I would call this a heavy weight cloud deployment, because it requires the hosting of a server in the cloud and the maintenance of a secure connection to the back-end systems.

With River RDE there is the option to deploy individual Fiori applications to the HANA Cloud Platform with the advantage that no server hosting is needed and the secure connection to the back-end systems is taken care of by the HANA Cloud Connector.

In a previous blog I explained how to Extend SAP Fiori application leveraging SAP River Rapid Development Environment in 10 minutes. For this I loaded a Fiori application from the ABAP Business Server Page repository into River RDE to extend it from there and then redeploy it to the on premise repository.

However there is another option and that is to deploy the downloaded Fiori application to the HANA Cloud Platform. Given that I already downloaded the Fiori application

For this I have to enter my HANA Cloud Platform account information and select Deploy:

I get a success message with the request to manage an activated version before being able to run the Fiori application in the HANA Cloud Platform:

For this I log into my HANA Cloud Platform account and find my Fiori application within the HTML5 Applications. To create a version that can be activated I select the application:

I chose Development from the Content menu:

And create a new version 0.1, because I would like to extend it to a final version 1.0 via Git and Eclipse in my next blog:

Next I chose Version Management:

And activate this application version:

I confirm to restart the application, in fact, in my case, it is the first start because there had been no active version before:

To launch the Fiori application in the HANA Cloud Platform I click on the generated Application URL:

This Fiori application is now easily accessible from anywhere in the Internet while still accessing on premise data, with security managed by the HANA Cloud Platform and the HANA Cloud Connector:

The mechanism behind this HANA Cloud deployment is Git and in my next blog I will demonstrate how to extend a Fiori application in Eclipse rather than the River RDE, which might be preferable if Eclipse was your main development tool.