What’s new with Application connectivity in SAP BTP Kyma runtime?

With the availability of Kyma 2.0 open source for the SAP BTP, Kyma runtime, there will be significant improvements in how one can access the data and update the state for connected SAP Solutions.

These improvements make the whole flow not only simpler but also reduce the number of components deployed thus improving the efficiency.

Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on SAP BTP, Kyma runtimes running on Kyma open source version 2.0. For existing SAP BTP Kyma runtimes which are on Kyma open source 1.0, they will need to wait until their Kyma runtimes are upgraded to Kyma open source 2.0.

How was it in pre-Kyma 2.0?

For every connected SAP Solution via application connector, as a developer you were

• Creating a Binding to the namespace from where you wanted to make API calls
• In the Bounded namespace, you will need to create instances of the API plans which you would like to consume.
• Then create service binding with a function or a microservice to access the gateway URL.
• Write code to make the API calls.

A gateway component was created in every namespace. The component acted as a proxy and also took care of injecting the credentials when making API calls to connected SAP Systems

With Kyma 2.0

To achieve the same result, you will

• Copy the Central Gateway URL of the API you would like to consume
• Use it in your business logic to make the API calls

That’s it. No more bindings or service instance creations.

Another positive and useful implication of having a central gateway URL is that the GATEWAY_URL is predictable and does not contain any unique ids.

For example, it. would be of the similar form as below:

http://central-application-gateway.kyma-system.svc.cluster.local:8082/mp-gaurav-10-mock-ccv2/sap-commerce-cloud-commerce-webservices/sap-commerce-cloud-commerce-webservices

where mp-gaurav-10-mock-ccv2 is the name of the application as manifested in the Kyma console UI.

This helps in migrating configurations from say a stage to a production environment in a predictable automated fashion with no manual changes required. For example, One only needs to use Helm templates to provide the application name via values.yaml

This central application gateway acts as a proxy and takes care of injecting the credentials when making API calls to connected SAP Systems

Takeaways

• Fewer steps to consume APIs of connected SAP Solutions
• Consistent and predictable Gateway URLs with no unique ids.
• For now, Kyma will support both old and new models

Looking forward to your feedback and comments here. 

If you have further questions about Kyma, feel free to post them in the answers area of the SAP Community, here is a link.
To stay up to date with everything in Kyma, make sure to visit our Kyma topic page.