Extending SAP S/4HANA: Side-by-Side Extensions with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK – Book Report

One of the latest additions to the rich portfolio of SAP PRESS, is a book on building side-by-side extensions on SAP S/4HANA using the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK. This book is a natural follow up to our last month’s release of the SAP S/4HANA 1805 Cloud, which comes with more than 500 new innovations enabling a truly intelligent enterprise suite, giving our customers a clear direction towards transition into the Cloud.

We are committed to being at the side of our customers during this journey.

In this context, one question we are often asked is – “How to build applications on SAP Cloud Platform that extend core business processes running in SAP S/4HANA, in a secure and robust manner?”

And as I often state, a good SaaS solution needs a good PaaS. And based on the SAP Cloud Platform, SAP, customers and partners have already built a great amount of value adding apps. This bookmakes an honest attempt to answer exactly this question.

Source: SAP PRESS

The book appeals to strategists, decision makers, architects, developers and IT operations folks alike. For the various roles, the book offers specific reading paths, to ensure a pertinent read for everyone.

As a Product Manager, I found it particularly interesting to read about the evolution and design principles of SAP S/4HANA (simplicity, compatibility, cloud-first, to name a few). For the technically inclined, the book takes the readers through building an extension application piece-by-piece, to a point where the application is deployed, monitored and operated on the Cloud.

The application thus built is fully decorated with cloud-native qualities, such as Security, Multi-tenancy, REST APIs consumption, Test and Build Automation, DevOps and Continuous Delivery, all using the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK. The book also talks about how to extend SAP S/4HANA with SAP Leonardo Machine Learning and Blockchain services, and much more.

This figure gives a sneak-peak into the overall SAP S/4HANA side-by-side extension scenario components, as explained in this book.

To add the icing on the cake, the readers of the book get access to all code samples that are used in building the application, making it possible to directly apply the concepts. You can also find all coding examples from the various chapters as open-source contribution on Github.com: https://sap.github.io/cloud-s4-sdk-book/.

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