SAP Content Agent service: Enhanced Transport experience for SAP API Management content in the Cloud Foundry environment

Overview

With SAP API Management, you can create simple digital experiences for your consumers, partners, and employees. SAP API Management lets you publish, promote, and oversee APIs in a secure and scalable environment.

The CF (Cloud Foundry) environment gives you the ability to subscribe to the API Management service, while you may choose a public infrastructure to run the API Management service, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

Until now, the only way to transport SAP API management content artifacts between tenants in the CF environment was to manually export and import them. Now, with the help of the SAP Content Agent service, you can do this with much more convenience and efficiency.

Content Agent service is a Cloud Foundry-based utility service. It acts like an agent that allows you to assemble the API Management content and also export it to the transport queue using transport solutions like SAP Cloud Transport Management or the Enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+). This is equivalent to the assembly and export functionality provided by Solution Lifecycle Management Service in the Neo Environment.

For a high-level view of what is happening take a look at the schematic below.

Content Agent service Schematic

SAP Content Agent Service has already been available for transporting SAP Cloud Integration content since August 2020. Check out my original Blog here.

In this blog, I will briefly show you how to set up the transport of SAP API Management content using the SAP Content Agent service, along with the SAP Cloud Transport Management service.

Setup

For the purpose of simplicity, I will take the example of setting up transports between two SAP API Management (API Portal) tenants, e.g. the development tenant (DEV) and the test tenant (QAS). This is what is currently supported by the service as well. To manage transports in a three-tenant landscape, you can use SAP Cloud Transport Management, using different combinations of transport routes.

What you will need(Prerequisites):

1. Two separate SAP SAP API Management(API Portal) tenants, attached to separate CF subaccounts. Let’s call them DEV(source) and QAS(target). These subaccounts should also have their respective CF spaces created with adequate resources assigned in their quota plans. For more information on entitlements, see here. For more information on configuring Quota plans for spaces, see here.
2. Subscription and admin access to the SAP Cloud Transport Management service.
3. A sample API Management content artifact that you can use to transport between the two API Management (API Portal) tenants.

Setup Instructions:

Setting up this scenario is quite easy and similar to the SAP Cloud Integration content transport scenario that I set up and documented in another blog. Here are the detailed instructions for setting up this scenario.

Testing the Setup:

1. In your source SAP API Management tenant, go to the ‘Develop’ view.
2. Click the ‘Action’ icon in the row corresponding to the content your want to Transport or Export.
3. Choose the ‘Transport’ option out of the available actions, and fill out the description for the transport in the pop-up that comes up.
4. In case of success, you should get a message such as “The reference number for the transport request generated is <XXXXX>, TR ID: <XXXX>”
5. In the SAP Cloud Transport Management web UI, go to the Import queue of the target node created in the setup process above. The transport request created in step 4 should be already added to this queue.
6. Import this transport request into the target node.
7. Go to the ‘Develop’ view of your target SAP API Management tenant. The content package exported from the source SAP API Management tenant should have been imported and should be available here.
8. Similarly, you can try out transporting other types of API Management content like API Proxies, API Providers, Certificates, and Key-Value Maps. You may have to edit some security fields for contents imported into the target account. Check out how to do all that here.

Important points to note

1. Please makes sure you have administrator access to the API Management(API Portal) service.
2. The target CF subaccount should also have the requisite entitlements for the SAP API Management (API Portal) service plan so that the deployments to the target account can happen smoothly.

I hope this article was clear enough to help you set up the SAP Content Agent service, enhancing your transport experience for SAP API Management content in the CF environment.

Hope you enjoyed this article. If there are any questions, please let me know in the comments below.

Further information

What is SAP API Management?

For the latest on SAP Content Agent service, please look here.