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Author's profile photo Sven Huberti

SAP Cloud Platform Integration – environment types and connections

Lately I got into discussions with colleagues and customers about SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) licensing.

As you know, there are several aspects to it. CPI Environment and License Model being two of them.

 

From an runtime perspective, you can chose to run the CPI in the NEO or CloudFoundry (CF) SAP Cloud Platform.

For now we still have a few limitations on CF, but they are being removed as I write these lines. On the other hand, you have the possibility to perform a free trial, which you cannot do on NEO.

 

From a licensing perspective, you can chose between a subscription-based and a pay-per-use license model.

The subscription model allows to rent the integration service for a specific amount of time, with a specific amount of features, within predefined boundaries. For instance, the PI Edition features 3 connections, and 10Gb bandwidth per month (way enough for any customer I talked to).

The CPEA model is like a prepaid card that you buy upfront and consume as you need: integration service, workflow service and business rules service one month, integration service, api management and WebIDE the following month (just an example).

In both environments, the PI Edition of CPI is limited to 3 connections.

A connection is described in the SAP Cloud Platform Service Description document, page 24 (“Additional connections”):

“A connection is an association between two unique end points via the SAP Cloud Platform Integration. A unique end point is a combination of the IP address and the port. Non-production connections shall not be counted for purposes of determining the number of connections.”

As you can see, non-production connections, ie. connections in non-productive CPI tenants, are not counted regarding licensing.

You may wonder how you can check the amount of connections you are consuming: this is pretty simple. Just go to your CPI tenant cockpit, ie. subaccount cockpit, and see for yourself:

On the top of the page, you can use the breadcrumb navigation to cycle through your CPI subaccounts, productive or non-productive.

In case you want to declare a tenant to be non-productive (in this case, no SLA is applied to it), you can now do it for both CPEA and subscription license models by following the note 2784487.

 

Note that everything written here can be changed without further notice by SAP and cannot be part of any contract…

Hope this helped!

 

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      Author's profile photo Raffael Herrmann
      Raffael Herrmann

      Hi Sven,

      thanks for the blog post. I had similar discussions with some clients. Two follow-up questions came to my mind, when reading your blog. (Maybe you can clarify on that points.)

      • When it comes to licensing, is there any pre-condition that has to be met to be able to book a CPI (regardless if CPEA or subscription model)? (Like basis fees, general Cloud Platform access.) E.g. if we have a customer that has no Cloud Platform access at all. Can he buy just (and only) a CPI subscription?
      • Concerning the connections: Is there a more detailed list on the connections? I saw that you posted the definition of a connection, but I would love to see how SAP actually counts them. For example in our tenant it shows "28 connections". Instead of this I would like to see a list like: Connection 1 is from A to B, connection 2... This would make things way more transparent to the customers.

      Best regards,
      Raffael

      Author's profile photo Sven Huberti
      Sven Huberti
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Raffael,

      thanks for adding to the list of questions!

      • customers do not need any pre-condition, eg. SAP Cloud Platform. We will provision them a global account if they "buy" the Cloud Integration service.
      • unfortunately I also get this question and the answer is also "no": there is no detailed view on the connections. However, Adam Kiwon told me he was working on something in that direction. Not sure what his current status is.

      Sorry if I can't help that much on this one!

      Sven

      Author's profile photo Adam Kiwon
      Adam Kiwon

      Dear Sven,

      we are indeed working on a graphical visualization of SAP interfaces (based on our Interface Catalogs for SAP PI/PO and SAP CPI). We will share this in April with the community.
      Raffael Herrmann: In case you ask: we will add as a separate product into our portfolio.

      Best regards, Adam

      Author's profile photo Raffael Herrmann
      Raffael Herrmann

      Hi Adam,

      Can you give a quick hint, how your future product correlates to the connection list bespoken in this article, Adam Kiwon? Because we also have a connection list for internal use and I fear SAP does calculate the “connections” in a not transparent/different manner than you or I would do.

      For example we have 100 endpoints spread over 82 IFlows. But shown in the subaccount are only 28 connections. Since SAP defines a connection via IP and Port I guess that to create such connection list (with details) would create the need to parse all communication logs. Will your future product show the 100 (82) connections in the list or do you really check the logs and will show the 28 connections (which is the value actually calculated by SAP for our subaccount)?

      If I understand it right even one IFlow with one sender channel and a fixed receiver channel could count up as 100+ connections, if 100 different systems/users call the IFlow. Correct, Sven Huberti?

      Best regards

      Author's profile photo Adam Kiwon
      Adam Kiwon

      Dear Raffael,

      Thanks for the statement, much appreciated.

      For CPI we plan to handle each sender (pull) and receiver (combination of host/IP and adapter type) as one node. In addition, each sender service (endpoint for push adapters like SOAP, HTTP) will be managed as a node, too (probably grouped into clusters).

      So we will not analyze the traffic, but it will be created based on the static integration content.

      You will then see (very likely) more than 28 nodes in the map which does not really reflect the amount of connections calculated by SAP.

      Hope this helps - it is more about bringing transparency to the users than allowing a proper license calculation. Our experience is: when customers start getting serious about CPI usage, the enterprise edition (flatrate model) is the license to go with.

      Best regards, Adam

       

      Author's profile photo Sven Huberti
      Sven Huberti
      Blog Post Author

      Hello,

      as per the defintion of a “Connection”, yes: variable amount of senders means variable amount of connections.

      This is why large customers tend to go to the Enterprise Edition – which does not count connections at all. PI Edition is fine for SMBs, rather not for potentially hundreds of connections.

      In case you are having a “public” integration flow, ie. you don’t know exactly who will use it and in what extend, my recommendation would be to publish it as a REST API. This REST API should then be protected, monitored and documented by SAP Cloud Platform API Management. That would add traffic management and access control capabilities (IP based), as well as multidimensional monitoring and a central place for developers/integration experts to discover and understand your interfaces (just like we do on the API Business Hub)…

      BR!

      EDIT: SOAP can also be used in SCP API Management, but that's not the typical REST architectural style

       

      Author's profile photo Manuel Lozano
      Manuel Lozano

      Dear Adam,

      Finally, is there any tool where I can see the connections?

      Thanks

      Manuel

      Author's profile photo Adam Kiwon
      Adam Kiwon

      Dear Manuel,

      Yes, our Interface Catalog for SAP Cloud Integration is covering this meanwhile:

      https://www.integration-excellence.com/interfacecatalog-cloud-edition/

      Best regards, Adam

      Author's profile photo Amol Tyagi
      Amol Tyagi

      Hi Sven,

       

      Thanks for the article. One follow up question regarding the bandwidth:

      Where can we check how much of the bandwidth (10 GB) a customer is consuming?

      Are there additional charges if one exceeds it?

       

      Best regards,

      Amol

      Author's profile photo Sven Huberti
      Sven Huberti
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Amol,

      I am no pricing specialist hence I cannot really answer your question in detail.

      However I know that no customer has ever reached the 10Gb bandwidth limit.

      Under Subscription, if a customer reaches the limit, a sales rep would get in contact with the him to discuss the situation (was it planned, was it a load test, is more required in the following months, ...).

      AFAIK, under CPEA contract, you automatically get billed for more bandwidth (see the estimator for current prices).

      Again: it would be best to talk to your sales rep about this - to get official information!

      BR!

      Sven