How easy to get started on HANA Cloud Integration

After working more than 4 years in SAP’s mobile solutions at this point of my career I feel a bit saturated. I find it difficult to plan my career ahead as I am confused on what I should update myself on? Usually I do not get hooked on to the titles and positions; I focus on role that I will enjoy most and which will bring more opportunities to learn. I sometimes thought about changing the technology to check whether I could still acquire new skills quickly.

Recently I got an opportunity to put my hands in a different technology I have ever tried before –  HANA Cloud Integration. I looked at it from two angles.

• It would be a big addition to the current skills I possess.
• And it is a big opportunity to work in a cloud based solution, which is the future.

How I get started?

Right, it is uncomfortable to imagine being a beginner in something again. To learn HCI, I have started by reading the documentation and following the video tutorials. But it made be incurious. Because it is not the way I used to learn. I believe that the time taken to learn a new skill is comparatively less if we actually sit down and practice instead of reading a bunch of documents.

Hence after understand the basics of HCI I instantly took the responsibility of building a new package for HCI(which will be a part of the product soon). And it made me comfortable with the tool in couple of weeks.

Some of the features in the tool excited me. Especially the tracing feature is something tells us that HCI was developed keeping in mind that it should be developer friendly.

I haven’t tried all the features of HCI but after spending few weeks on the tool I could guarantee that it is really easy to learn.

Here is the thing!

While learning a new skill you don’t have to worry about mastering the skill. Understand what is HCI and why it is needed ,then start practicing(it’s the key). For couple of weeks you just need to practice enough to get the results you want.

My picks are:

• Get a instance of HCI.
• Set up the development environment(Eclipse).
• Know the dev environment:
  • Overview
  • Checking status of integration deployments
  • Understanding the logs
• Create a simple project – follow this example.
• Tracing
• HCI Tenant, Inbound Message, Outbound Message, Certificates, Public Key; know about security basics.
• More exercises:
  • HCI Twitter Integration
  • Webservice to Mail using HCI
  • Configuring HANA Cloud Connector with HCI to Use OData Adaptor
  • Batch Request in SAP HCI OData Adaptor

• Product Road Map.

Happy learning.