Fiori Deployment Options – revisited
There has been some recent changes in the Fiori Deployment options and in this blog I am going to summarize them and also show you how SAP Cloud Platform can help simplify your landscape. The complete SAP document is available here.
Multi-system SAP Business Suite scenarios
If you have multiple SAP Business Suite systems, the recommendation still remains the same. You have a dedicated SAP Fiori Fronted-end server(FES) for a hub deployment. The central FES has the Fiori Launchpad contents, Fiori Apps and can be used to launch the classical UIs from the respective backend system. You have one single entry point to access all the business applications.
One single S/4HANA system with an existing Business Suite system
With S/4HANA coming into an existing business system landscape, you can continue to have a Gateway hub deployment. The central FES can server Fiori apps for both Business Suite systems as well as S/4HANA systems. However, its important to note that based on the release of S/4HANA, your FES needs to be upgraded. S/4HANA 1610 needs FES 3.0 & S/4HANA 1709 needs FES 4.0. I have seen few people get confused with this and actually referred to this as Fiori 3.0 and 4.0 concepts. As of today, we only have Fiori 2.0 concepts. FES 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 are Front-end server components as explained in this SAP Note https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2217489. The FES database also needs to be a SAP database.
Additional S/4HANA systems within an existing system landscape
This is where it gets interesting. I didn’t think there would be many organizations who would have multiple S/4HANA systems. In reality, there are many who end up having multiple S/4HANA systems for various reasons – like mergers and acquisitions. In this scenario, for the newly added S/4HANA system, an embedded Gateway scenario is recommended. This means we will have a system-local S/4HANA Fiori Launchpad to serve Fiori apps for that particular system (as shown in the below image for 1709 release). There will also be a central Fiori Launchpad which will serve the UI contents for the existing landscape and using URL tiles will be able to launch the system-local launchpad or specific apps.
This may not be the best User Experience(UX) but this is the only option which is available. The reason for having multiple Fiori Launchpad comes down to the dependencies of UI components with the backend systems.
Multiple S/4HANA systems
When you have multiple S/4HANA systems within your landscape, its again recommended to have an embedded FES deployment in each of them. Each of the S/4HANA systems will have its own UI contents and Fiori Launchpad. You could have a central FES which connects to all the S/4HANA systems in the landscape. Release independent UI’s like My Inbox or custom app can be deployed on this central Fiori Launchpad. When you want to launch standard Fiori apps located in the respective S/4HANA backend system, you would need to create tiles based on URL Apps from the central launchpad.
Fiori Cloud
Fiori Cloud provides a simple approach for Business Suite and S/4HANA customers to adopt Fiori User Experience in the Cloud. Fiori Apps, SAPUI5 library and Fiori Launchpad are all provided through SAP Cloud Platform and can be used to connect to an on-premise backend system. In this scenario, you only maintain your backend system and don’t need to patching/upgrading the UI components in your FES.
Lets looks at each of the option below.
SAP Fiori Cloud for Business Suite system
This is the most common Fiori Cloud Implementation which I am seeing. You have a choice here to either have your Gateway hub deployment, Gateway embedded deployment or even leverage SAP CP OData Provisioning in the cloud. When you have your Gateway system either as embedded or Hub, its important to note that you use it to only register your OData services. You do not install UI components within this Gateway system as all these contents would be served from Fiori Cloud. In the above image, you can see SAP CP OData Provisioning being leveraged. It requires Gateway enablement components in your Business Suite system. This is required to support OData services in your backend system.
SAP Fiori Cloud for S/4HANA system
For an S4/HANA system to work with Fiori Cloud and embedded Gateway is recommended. You shouldn’t use SAP CP OData Provisioning for this type of scenario.
SAP Fiori Cloud for S/4HANA system & Business Suite system in the same landscape
When you have multiple systems in your landscape, the recommendation is to use Gateway Hub deployment. As mentioned above, the Gateway Hub only serves the role to register your OData services as all the UI components are being delivered via Fiori Cloud.
Fiori Cloud provides business contents (Standard Fiori Apps) for both Business Suite as well as respective S/4HANA releases. As of today, you can connect to S/4HANA system & Business Suite system in the your landscape and serve Fiori Apps from a central launchpad. What makes it very interesting with Fiori Cloud is that soon we would be able to consume Fiori Apps for multiple releases all in the same Fiori Launchpad.
In the Fiori Configuration cockpit, under content packages you can register from the available content packages and assign them to your respective backend systems.
In the content management, it would be possible to switch to either S4HANA release or Business suite system and add them the site configuration.
This would make it possible to have a central Fiori Launchpad to sever Fiori contents for S/4HANA & Business Suite systems. In the future roadmap, there are plans to make it possible to have a central Fiori Launchpad which would support UI contents from different S/4HANA releases, thereby simplifying your on-premise landscape.
Hi Murali,
You've done a good job of explaining the document but it seems the document scenarios are more confusing that it should be right now; as it's strange that there is no recommendation in this document (from my quick scan) clearly stating what the set-up should be for a single S4/HANA system without a separate ERP/CRM. e.g. A real opportunity for you to address that in this blog if you want to (hint hint).
e.g . I recently heard that the recommendation is embedded Fiori/Gateway for a single S4/HANA; and that SCP is not ready to support a full S4/HANA which sort of surprised me as that is the obvious direction (but does imply that all apps need to be written in a cloud safe way which I still haven't heard of that problem being fully solved so can understand why).
Personally, I just hope SCP Fiori/Gateway Front End is turned around ASAP as maintaining UI5 libraries in ABAP is just painful; and determining all the front-end versions and notes for apps when you patch the back-end is not made any easier with Maintenance Optimiser leading to many apps being out of date or plain buggy. Not to mention, moving to SCP after you are live will mean losing everyone's personalisation which is a very important aspect of any Fiori Launchpad deployment after a while.
Thanks for posting,
Matt
Worth looking at this post just posted at the exact same time as yours too (team work?): https://blogs.sap.com/2018/05/14/the-s4hana-generation-sap-ux-integration-back-to-the-portal.../
Hi Matt,
Thanks. I have been getting questions on this topic almost every week and its good that Andy also blogged on the same topic. Just coincidence 🙂 The title of the document (which I referred to) itself has the word "recommendations", but I agree with you that it doesn't go into the details of the setup for each scenario. Probably we have to scan through those SAP Help links.
Correct, there were recent announcements on the embedded FES for S/4HANA and currently SCP OData Provisioning doesn't support connecting to S/4HANA. It is disappointing. However, this doesnt mean that the customer has to maintain UI5 libraries in the backend. For SCP Fiori Cloud scenarios, UI5 libraries/Fiori apps are all served from the Cloud. FES system (embedded or Hub) is only used to register the OData services.
Hi Murali,
I can imagine S4 customers starting out would definitely want to figure out this and I can understand the complexities of these larger customers for sure. Just figure the low hanging fruit of the easy single S4 on premise instance would make an appearance in the recommendations.
In terms of Fiori Cloud usage - I suppose that's actually where dependencies get overly complex and hard. I mean - Is the Fiori app you have deployed manually from S4/HANA onto the Fiori Cloud match the version of UI5 from a support perspective; and how do you ensure you keep the FIori Cloud in sync with the back-end Fiori version that is deployed/patched. And then, will SAP introduce dependencies on the UI5 version in the unused part of the on premise Fiori deployment.
The dream of Fiori Cloud is the S4 apps should also be fully tested and updated as required by SAP themselves (at least from an OPA test perspective) so that you don't suddenly find that a biweekly update has broken your production system.
e.g. Wouldn't it be great if any new version of FES was immediately available on Fiori Cloud, and you could immediately jump to it without needing to do full regression testing because of that trust that all versions of the S4 HANA Fiori apps are already tested; even on "your" version of S4..
That all said, realistically, things rarely break when it comes to more recent Fiori apps (especially custom ones); but they do break; and hence it only takes one non-backwards compatible change to a Fiori Elements template to change in Fiori Cloud to break a lot of your production UI and lose the trust.
Just personally, I believe the way to go for those with S4/HANA who don't have 24/7 requirements, is simply to use the Gateway and Fiori front end on their S4/HANA. Simplicity being the focus until Fiori Cloud and biweekly updates without intervention from the customer become a reality.
Anyway, just some random thoughts. Hope some others chime in on their thoughts...
Cheers,
Matt
Nice thoughts Matt Harding and Murali Shanmugham - I was interested in the recent embedded FES recommendations given as previously the recommendation was the hub deployment and having a separate Front end server so that the backend system was not accessed directly. I am still a fan of this but also promote and recommend Fiori Cloud although there are definitely limitations.
Nice blog though as it covers the main deployment options - thanks for sharing!
Thanks
Phil Cooley
Hi All,
Can we implement Fiori 3.0 on ECC? currently we are in ECC 6.0 and NW 7.5. Please let me know what are the possibilities Thank you,