Introduction
In June 2022 SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh (AEM) was launched on SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) as an event streaming, event management and monitoring platform which enables organizations to implement modern event-driven architecture (EDA) application environments.
Components of Advanced Event Mesh
Event Streaming Events are significant changes of state that a producer generates and one or many consumer(s) consume. These events are continuously generated, captured, and transmitted in real-time via one or many event broker(s) |
Event Management Event Portal is a centralized platform for the management, discovery, collaboration, and governance of events. It serves as a hub for organizing, documenting, and visualizing events, schemas, and related components |
Event Monitoring and Insights Observing, analyzing, and deriving information from events and related components involving monitoring event streams, identifying patterns, and gaining insights to improve system performance, troubleshoot issues, or make data-driven decisions |
Commercial availability of Advanced Event Mesh
In June 2022, Advanced Event Mesh was launched via the consumption-based licensing model, through CPEA credits or Pay-As-You-Go. Both methods are based on consumption of services, either hourly (event brokers) or monthly (deployment regions). The aforementioned capabilities of Event Streaming, Event Management, and Event Monitoring and Insights are always bundled into event brokers, while deployment regions allow flexible deployment and ownership options (more details in the documentation).
Customer feedback
Over the last 20 months, we have seen strong adoption of SAP Advanced Event Mesh. Customer feedback was generally positive, but we are always looking for areas of improvement. In this endeavor, three areas of improvement were identified:
Incorporating Latest Innovations
Even though EDA is not a brand-new technology, its rate of innovation is still high. One example is Distributed Tracing which allows customers monitor and troubleshoot complex distributed systems including event producers, event consumers, and the event mesh (network of event brokers) in between. Additionally, some use cases (e.g. Replay) require buffering of events over a given timeframe, which requires additional message spool size on the event broker.
These new innovations are now available to AEM customers.
Further simplification of licensing
The different options (aka Deployment Regions) to deploy Advanced Event Mesh are important to satisfy various customer requirements, and they continue to be available to AEM customers. However, from a licensing perspective customers were confused to pick and choose between the different options available. In addition, these deployment options were being charged monthly whereas the brokers themselves were being charged hourly. We have now bundled deployment regions into the event brokers, meaning technically the choice between the different options is still available but there is no additional cost associated with it anymore.
Flexibility to License Advanced Event Mesh
Consumption-based licensing is a great way for customers to adopt a new technology like EDA, especially if they can’t really estimate future consumption patterns, impact of new use cases etc. etc. A breathing infrastructure prevents over-investment and under-provisioning respectively.
However, some customers are very well able to predict their future workloads and therefore consumption patterns. These customers typically prefer subscriptions for one or more years over purely consumption-based licensing to minimize their overall TCO (think of reserved instances on hyperscalers). Subscription-based licensing is now available for AEM customers in addition to consumption-based licensing.
Changes in detail
There is a lot to unpack in the changes mentioned above, especially the new features and innovations. Let’s look at them in detail.
Distributed Tracing
Imagine you have a large e-commerce platform with multiple microservices handling various functions such as user authentication, product catalog management, order processing, and payment processing. Each of these microservices communicates with each other over a network.
Now, suppose a user reports that they are experiencing slow checkout times when trying to place an order. Without distributed tracing, identifying the root cause of the problem can be challenging because there are multiple interconnected components involved.
When distributed tracing is enabled, the event broker generates special guaranteed messages when certain operations happen. The publisher and subscriber APIs also generate spans when messages are sent and received. Open Telemetry receivers then consume these messages from a particular queue and convert them to a format that can be received, processed, and viewed using common Open Telemetry backends such as Jaeger and DataDog.
This enables end-2-end tracing and visualization of events across multiple applications and event brokers to identify bottlenecks, perform Root Cause Analysis and general optimizations and improvements.
Additional Spool Size
A common use case for extending the available Message Spool size is message replay. An example would be a financial institution that is required by regulatory authorities to keep a detailed record of all trading activities for compliance reasons, and message replay allows the complete reconstruction of the entire sequence of trading events. To enable message replay oftentimes additional storage (Spool) needs to be leveraged.
Bundling of Deployment Regions
Choosing the right deployment option is a critical part of building a well-design event-driven application. Operational cost, location, resource provisioning, configuration management, security and other concerns are important factors to consider when selecting a deployment solution.
Following options are available:
- Public Region: Dedicated event broker services are deployed in SAP-controlled shared VPC/VNets on public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure.
- Dedicated Regions: Dedicated event broker services are deployed in SAP-controlled VPC/VNets dedicated to the customer on public cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- Customer Private Regions: Dedicated event broker services are deployed in a customer's on-premises or cloud-based Kubernetes cluster, such as OpenShift, Rancher (RKE1), Amazon (EKS), Azure (AKS, ARO), Google (GKE), Alibaba (ACK), Huawei (CCE)
All these options above are available to both Default Service Plan as well as Standard Service Plan customers, only for Default Service Plan customers there is an additional monthly charge.
How it All Comes Together
The enhancements introduced in February 2024 are now available via the new Standard Service Plan. The older version of Advanced Event Mesh, via the default plan, is still available for customers with a few caveats (more on this further below).
Table comparing the different service plans for licensing Advanced Event Mesh
Product | Default Plan | Default Plan | Standard Plan | Standard Plan |
| Hourly pricing | Monthly Pricing | Hourly Pricing | Subscription |
Tenant (100) | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Tenant (250) | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Tenant (1k) | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Tenant (5k) | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Tenant (10k) | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Tenant (50k) | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Tenant (100) | Yes | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Customer Private Region | N/A | Yes | N/A | N/A |
Dedicated Region | N/A | Yes | N/A | N/A |
Message Spool Add-On (500GB) | N/A | N/A | Yes | Yes |
Please note that Customer Private Region as well as Dedicated Region are still available to Standard Plan customers, there is just no additional cost anymore.
Picking the Right Service Plan
With all the additional innovations available to AEM customers, simplifications on the one hand and additional options on the other, we recommend the Standard Plan for all Advanced Event Mesh customers going forward.
However, if you already have a deployment based on the Default Plan, we encourage you to migrate to the new service plan as soon as possible. There is no technical impact to help you plan your migration to the new service plan when it is convenient for you. The Default plan will be deprecated later this year and will not receive any of the new innovations.
As of October, 2024 existing CPEA customer are able to deploy new Default Service Plan brokers until their CPEA contract renewal date. After this contract renewal, they cannot deploy new brokers on the Default service plan. But the already running brokers are not impacted and will continue to run till you decide to decommission and upgrade to the brokers from Standard plan.
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