Device Connectivity Feature in SAP IoT vs. SAP Cloud Platform Internet of Things differences

[marcus_behrens]

How is the new device connectivity feature in SAP IoT different from what was offered in SAP Cloud Platform as a standalone service?

The easiest way for a developer to answer this question is to look at the differences at the API level. This is where the below chart comes in. It basically crosses out APIs or the part of the API, that is not available (anymore) for easy reference. Here is the legend for the numbers shown on the chart:

1. Instead of authentication in a proprietary way the regular Cloud Foundry authentication with SAML/OAUTH2 is supported. So all APIs dealing with Users and Sessions are gone and authentication is simpler and more secure for applications and users defined the SAP Cloud Platform way. Also tools like the SAP IoT SDK for NodeJS (github.com/SAP/leonardo-iot-sdk-nodejs) can be used for both the traditional SAP IoT APIs and for the new device connectivity APIs out of the box.


2. Instead of a proprietary tenant mechanism the Cloud Foundry tenant mechanism is used. This means for most of the APIs the tenant ID is known and unique within a cloud foundry subaccount and should not/can not be provided anymore. This makes the API calls shorter and simpler to call.


3. An ability to temporarely store raw measurements in our internal PostgresSQL or your Hana database is not available in SAP IoT. Incoming measurements are always and only stored in SAP IoT. If there is a mapping to a thing in SAP IoT then the data ends up there and you can call the variety of SAP IoT query APIs documented at help.sap.com Thing Data APIs with full business context. If there is no mapping defined then the data will end up in the SAP IoT Ingestion Error Log.


4. An ability to directly forward raw data to multiple places different then SAP IoT is not available. One option you have is to translate the filtering logic you used in the past into an SAP IoT rule condition and then use actions to selectively act on the data. Different to the former approach this has full access to the business context in streaming.

For other, smaller differences please make sure to refer to the SAP IoT documentation and look for "device connectivity". A set of tutorials showing how to make use of the new APIs has been posted at developers.sap.com/tutorials/iot-model-create and developers.sap.com/tutorials/iot-onboard-device.

The new device connectivity feature is exclusively available with the new, simplified, capacity unit based licensing for SAP IoT. Don't worry, if you are using the old APIs you can continue to use them until you are ready to move on to the new license and the new device connectivity feature.

If you have questions or feedback on this change please use the comment function below for clarification questions or discuss the changes in more detail in our online community at answers.sap.com SAP IoT. Find more learning and enablement material around SAP IoT and Edge in the learning journey at learning hub SAP IoT and Edge and on our community page at community.sap.com/topics/internet-of-things.

API list showing the differences