Best practices Cloud Integration Content in SAP Process Orchestration – Overview

SAP Process Orchestration and SAP Cloud Platform Integration are complementary offerings supporting enterprise application integration. Whereas the former has been used rather focusing on integrating your on-premise landscape for A2A and B2B scenarios, the latter specifically addresses cloud-to-cloud and on-premise-to-cloud applications.

The two integration platforms build the cornerstone for SAP’s long-term integration strategy with special emphasis on integration scenarios in cloud and hybrid environments. Here, check out the following paper at SAP Vision for Integrating SAP Applications in Cloud and Hybrid Environments: CIO Guide. In a nutshell, hybrid environments are integration scenarios that span across on-premise and cloud applications. For those kind of integration scenarios, when communicating through a middleware, the preferred option is SAP Cloud Platform Integration. SAP Process Orchestration 7.5 also supports the integration flow format of SAP Cloud Platform Integration, and hence can be used as middleware for hybrid scenarios as well. Therefore, customers may choose to deploy
integration content for SAP applications in the cloud into either SAP Process Orchestration or SAP Cloud Platform Integration.

On the SAP API Business hub, you find pre-packaged integration content for integrating SAP’s cloud applications which has been primarily build and released for SAP Cloud Platform Integration. Running the integration content on SAP Cloud Platform Integration allows you to benefit from the fast innovation cycles of a cloud solution. Here, the content development teams follow a cloud shipment model. New content versions can be automatically pushed into the runtime in alignment with an update of the corresponding cloud application ensuring compatibility across the whole end-to-end process. You may use the content as a sort of reference template for SAP Process Orchestration that you may customize or extend as needed. However, you need to be aware that since SAP Process Orchestration follows an on-premise shipment model with fewer shipments compared to cloud applications, you may not be able to always benefit from the latest enhancements.

Anyway, even if you like to play it the safe side with pre-packaged content by sticking to SAP Cloud Platform Integration (which is by the way our recommendation), you may like to explore the rich feature set of the Apache Camel based runtime of the cloud integration content component on SAP Process Orchestration for other integration scenarios and use cases. This blog is actually the very first blog within a blog series providing best practices for cloud integration content on SAP Process Orchestration. It can be seen as landing page for the rest of the blogs where we intend to describe concrete tasks step-by-step.

For a start, you may like to read the SAP note 2428801 – FAQ: Cloud integration content in SAP Process Orchestration (PI).

Standard documentation can be found here.

The following blogs are available:

• How to set up system.jks on SAP Process Orchestration
• How to deploy security artifacts on SAP Process Orchestration
• Best practices with respect to product profiles
• How to deploy cloud integration content on SAP Process Orchestration
• Deployment enhancements with SAP Process Orchestration 7.5 SP10
• Proxy settings on SAP Cloud Platform Integration vs. SAP Process Orchestration
• Monitor cloud integration content on SAP Process Orchestration
• How to troubleshoot cloud integration content on SAP Process Orchestration

More to come, stay tuned.

Finally, I would like to point out that we cover the cloud integration content at this year’s SAP TechEd event as hands-on session. You can get your hands dirty by running an eInvoicing scenario from end-to-end. Check out the hands-on session CPL266 – Reuse of Cloud Integration Content with SAP Process Orchestration.