Technical Articles
From Neo to Multi-Cloud Foundation: How-To Transfer My SAP HANA XS Classic Applications in SAP BTP, Kyma runtime
I am a huge fan of tech conferences as they help me follow the latest trends in our fast-moving environment. If you are like me probably you have watched the SAP Teched 2021 session from Jan Schaffner – Explore the Unified Runtime Strategy for SAP Business Technology Platform. There he elaborated on the SAP Multi-Cloud strategy. There he pointed to an open-source project – XSK.io which shall be the foundation for a future enterprise-grade offering to provide a smoother migration path. It provides a compatibility layer for SAP HANA XS Classic application from SAP BTP, Neo environment to run on SAP BTP, Kyma runtime. Let me give you an overview of it.
XSK Overview
XSK provides a compatible environment for applications based on SAP HANA Extended Application Services (XS). Its goal is to allow you to run an existing SAP HANA XS Classic application from SAP BTP, Neo environment in SAP BTP, Kyma runtime and SAP HANA Cloud with minimal manual code changes.
In Neo an SAP HANA instance serves as both a database and an application server. It also has a build-in web-based development environment. With SAP HANA Cloud you get a cloud database as a service and XSK compliments it by providing all the rest. It supplies a web-based development environment so you can further evolve your applications. It also includes a migration tool which allows you in a wizard like manner to decide which DUs you want to migrate and transfer them into XSK projects.
The migration process transfers the sources of the original application, modifies them and generates additional artifacts to adapt the project to the new concept of HDI containers in SAP HANA Cloud.
XSK also takes care for the actual deployment of the db artifacts in SAP HANA Cloud. And finally, it serves the XSJS, XSOData and XSJobs logic of the application.
Benefits of moving to Multi-Cloud Foundation
Now that you better understand how XSK works let me try to summarize what you gain – with little to none manual effort you can transfer an XS Classis application from SAP BTP, Neo environment to Multi-cloud and leverage SAP HANA Cloud. This would allow your applications to follow the strategic direction from SAP and benefit from Multi-cloud services. It also allows you to implement microservice architecture patterns – you can use different XSK instance for your different applications thus separate their lifecycle and have different scalability options.
You can start today
You can evaluate XSK even today for free. You can use the Free Tier Model for SAP BTP to get a Kyma environment and a SAP HANA Cloud instance. Here you can find a step-by-step guide how to set-up XSK and a video how to trigger the migration itself. You can check-out the supported artifacts and APIs.
Stay tuned
Stay tuned for the upcoming blog posts in which I will cover in more details how to migrate a sample application and more.
What are the pros/cons between running XSJS on XSK or on XSA XSJS Compatibility layer ( @sap/xsjs)?
Hi Michael Cocquerel,
Project "XSK" offers the same programming model and development artifacts as XS Classic while with XSA you need to adopt to the different programming models coming with MTA and requires migration and adaptation of the application artifacts. The npm module strives to cover the XSJS files compatibility while XSK eliminates the need of change for the whole application, which includes also hdb artifacts, xsodata, xsaccess, etc.