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Rui-Nogueira
Advisor
Advisor
First announced at TechEd 2018, SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory is now available for customers and partners on SAP Cloud Platform and SAP C/4HANA Foundation.
SAP CLOUD PLATFORM EXTENSION FACTORY
The cloud-native extensibility framework for the Intelligent Enterprise

As of SAPPHIRENOW 2019, SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory supports customers and partners in creating cloud-native extensions for the Intelligent Enterprise.



To do so it provides various capabilities on different levels.

A Central Management Plane


The central Management Plane provides capabilities to store metadata (URL, APIs, events, etc..) of registered solutions. With that, customers can obtain an overview of their complete system landscape and provide their developers with easy and secured access to those systems in a consistent manner.

In addition the Management Plane ensures the secure and consistent usage of the APIs and events on supported runtimes.

These capabilities let customers and partners rely on one central registry containing the connectivity details for each SAP solution they want to use to develop extensions. This also includes the standardized usage (via Open Service Broker API) of services, being it from SAP Cloud Platform or third-party providers.

The central Management Plane provides these capabilities via APIs that can be used by administration UIs sitting on top of it.

Multiple Administration UIs


By leveraging the central Management Plane, customers will be able to access their registered SAP and third-party solutions and their APIs and events in the established administrative UIs in a consistent fashion. The cockpit of an SAP Cloud Platform global account and the cockpit of the SAP C/4HANA Foundation will leverage the central Management Plane.

This is a huge benefit for all SAP customers who want to create extensions or applications for the Intelligent Enterprise.

Runtime of Choice


The capabilities of the central Management Plane enable the support of different runtimes like Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, SAP Cloud Platform ABAP environment or serverless-based depending on the customers’ needs.

The concepts of the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory allow customers to select from various options to deploy their extension. It’s a matter of choosing the option that best serves the needs of the extension best and use that runtime, be it Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, the SAP Cloud Platform ABAP environment or a serverless runtime.

Infrastructure of Choice


Finally, the workload for extensions can run on various infrastructures provided by hyperscaler solutions like Azure, AWS, GCP, Alibaba Cloud. This ensures maximum flexibility to cater to the various needs of SAP’s customers and partners.

It’s There! You Can Use It!


With the concept outlined above, SAP has now delivered the first implementation of the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory. Customers and partners can use it today on SAP Cloud Platform and on SAP C/4HANA Foundation.

On SAP Cloud Platform


Fully integrated into the SAP Cloud Platform, the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory provides

  • A standardized way to register SAP LoB solutions on SAP Cloud Platform

  • A central registry for registered solutions with their APIs, events, and credentials

  • One developer experience for applications built on the SAP Cloud Platform environments (Cloud Foundry, ABAP, etc..)


SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory is available for all SAP Cloud Platform customers and partners with the SAP Cloud Platform updates by May 9, 2019.

Checkout the official documentation to learn how to use the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory.

 



Along with the 1905 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the following APIs will be usable for developers who want to develop extensions:

  • Business Partner, Customer and Partner (SAP_COM_0008)

  • Product (SAP_COM_0009)

  • Sales Order (SAP_COM_0109)




The SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory together with the SAP Cloud SDK allow developers to build easily cloud-native extensions for your SAP solutions on SAP Cloud Platform. You can learn more around the SAP Cloud SDK in this news article and get more technical details in the Cloud SDK blog post from Henning Heitkoetter.

Henning also explains in another blog post on how to use the SAP Cloud SDK specifically to use a registered system on a subac....



In addition, all SAP S/4HANA Cloud events (SAP_COM_0092) can be exposed to SAP Enterprise Messaging to create event-based extensions. Get more details in the blog post from Elizabeth Riemann to better understand how you can get started using the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory on SAP Cloud Platform after SAPPHIRENOW together with SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging.

On SAP C/4HANA Foundation


SAP C/4HANA customers and partners can build event-driven, cloud native extensions on Kubernetes-based runtimes, supported by the open source project “Kyma”.

Get more details on SAP C/4HANA Foundation and how cloud native extensibility and the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory fits in there in the blog post from Thomas Hertz.

Conclusion


With SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory, developers get a productivity boost to extend SAP LoB solutions and develop event-driven extensions and applications. This will support and help our customers and partners to create extensions for the Intelligent Enterprise with an increasing number of supported SAP solutions.

The initial release of SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory provides customers and partners already today with great new capabilities to develop, run and manage extensions. Moving forward additional SAP solutions will be supported and SAP will enhance the capabilities as outlined in this blog post.

Try it out!
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