From this article, you will know how to configure and use Cloud Connector in SAP Business Technology Platform on Alibaba Cloud. Before you start with cloud connector, you need to complete below items in Prerequisites section first.

Prerequisites

• Subaccount for Cloud Connector in SAP Business Technology Platform on Alibaba Cloud
• Entitlement of connectivity service for your subaccount
• Role configuration for Cloud Connector

Subaccount for Cloud Connector

Firstly you need to have a subaccount for Cloud Connector and this subaccount should be a member of the Global Account.

Entitlement of connectivity service for your subaccount

In order to use Cloud Connector, you need to assgin quota for connectivity service for your subaccount. After the entitlement, you can find related application identifier for connectivity in the role configuration section.

Role Configuration for Cloud Connector

The subaccount of Cloud Connector should be assigned below role:

• Cloud Connector Administrator

It is better to manage the role by creating a role collection, within the role collection you can assign all roles you need into the role collection.

Create new role collection for Cloud Connector

By Clicking the button New Role Collection you will see a pop window, you just need to input the collection name you want.

Just click Save button you will go to the home page that listing all role collections. Find the role collection you want and click the title of the role collection you will go to the detail page where you could configure all the roles you want.

You will see three drop down boxes there:

• Application Identifier – Identify the service application which the role based on.
• Role Templete – The pre-defined role templete of the service
• Role – The specified role you want to configure for your subaccount

For Cloud Connector, you just need to configure as below:

Now your subaccount have the access to allow the Cloud Connector to communicate with the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Installing & configuring the SAP Cloud Connector

With this section you will know how to prepare a environment with Cloud Connector client installed.

SAP provides several options for you to install Cloud Connector. You need to install Cloud Connector and configure the client to connect with SAP Business Technology Platform.

Below items are needed for Cloud Connector:

• Cloud Connector installation package
• Jave Runtime (Open-jdk installation)
• Docker (install docker image for cloud connector)

Install Cloud Connector

Access tools.hana.ondemand.com and search by Cloud Connector, you can find the available component name that accord with your target operation system. For this case I will use Linux version to build the docker environment.

Create directory and download the target cloud connector package

Create a new parent directory with name container-cc, then create child directory named as sapdownloads. Download the target installation package into the sapdownloads directory.

curl -LO https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/additional/sapcc-2.12.4-linux-x64.zip

In the same directory create a new file Dockerfile and with below content:

FROM centos:7

RUN yum -y install initscripts which unzip wget net-tools less

COPY sapdownloads /tmp/sapdownloads/
WORKDIR /tmp/sapdownloads/

RUN unzip sapcc*.zip && \
	rpm -i sapjvm*.rpm && \
	rpm -i com.sap.scc*.rpm

RUN chsh -s /bin/bash sccadmin

EXPOSE 8443
USER sccadmin
WORKDIR /opt/sap/scc

CMD /opt/sapjvm_8/bin/java \
	-server \
	-XtraceFile=log/vm_@PID_trace.log \
	-XX:+GCHistory \
	-XX:GCHistoryFilename=log/vm_@PID_gc.prf \
	-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError \
	-XX:+DisableExplicitGC \
	-Xms1024m \
	-Xmx1024m \
	-XX:MaxNewSize=512m \
	-XX:NewSize=512m \
	-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC \
	-XX:TargetSurvivorRatio=85 \
	-XX:SurvivorRatio=6 \
	-XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=2G \
	-Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.digester.PROPERTY_SOURCE=com.sap.scc.tomcat.utils.PropertyDigester \
	-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6 \
	-Dosgi.install.area=. \
	-DuseNaming=osgi \
	-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator.exclusiveInstallation=false \
	-Dcom.sap.core.process=ljs_node \
	-Declipse.ignoreApp=true \
	-Dosgi.noShutdown=true \
	-Dosgi.framework.activeThreadType=normal \
	-Dosgi.embedded.cleanupOnSave=true \
	-Dosgi.usesLimit=30 \
	-Djava.awt.headless=true \
	-Dio.netty.recycler.maxCapacity.default=256 \
	-jar plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar

The directory structure is as below:

.
├── Dockerfile
└── sapdownloads
    ├── sapcc-2.12.0.1-linux-x64.zip
    └── sapjvm-8.1.053-linux-x64.rpm

Build the docker image

Now you have everything ready to build the Docker image that will enable you to instantiate a Linux-based container running the SAP Cloud Connector. The Dockerfile contains instructions to build that image, and are briefly as follows:

• base the image on the CentOS Linux distribution (which has a reasonably small footprint)
• on top of the base image install some core tools
• copy across, from the host (your machine) to the image, the two files you downloaded (the SAP JVM and the SAP Cloud Connector component)
• unpack and install the SAP JVM and SAP Cloud Connector
• set up a shell & user (sccadmin) and instructions to start up the SAP Cloud Connector for when a container is created

In the container-scc/ directory (where the Dockerfile file is located), build the image as follows:

docker build -t scc .

You can find all the images by below command:

docker image ls --all

Instantiate a container

By running below command to initialize new container for cloud connector:

docker run -p 8443:8443 --name myscc -d scc

Now you are running cloud connector client on port 8443 and with name myscc, meanwhile you enable the detached mode.

By running below command to list all the containers you have:

docker container ls --all

You will find your container with name myscc is running and providing service now.

In case you want to restart the container for some reasons you could run below command:

docker container start <contaiername>

Configure Cloud Connector client

Access https://localhost:8443 to get into the home page of Cloud Connector. At the first time you shall need to change the password. The initial username&password is Administrator & manage.

Finally you get into the home page of the cloud connector.

Specify the appropriate details for your subaccount, as follows:

• Regions – For SAP Business Technology Platform on Alibaba Cloud, the region value shoule be cf.cn40.platform.sapcloud.cn
• Suaccount – This should be the ID of your subaccount, you can find this subaccount ID from the home page of your subaccount in the cockpit.
• Login E-mail – This should be the email address for you to login into the subaccount in SAP Business Technology Platform on Alibaba Cloud
• Password – The password of the login e-mail. Notice that if you already enabled the two-factor authentication for your login user, you should format the password as password+passcode (no need to input +).

Click the arrow button of the subaccount in the Subaccount Dashboard, you will get into the detail page of the connected subaccount:

Now you complete all the necessary steps to build the connection with the SAP Business Technology Platform on Alibaba Cloud. Congratulations!

Resources

Cloud Connector on SAP Help Portal