All the benefits cloud has to offer

The competitiveness of the modern market pushes customers to find ways to act on all the advantages of cloud solutions. This sometimes requires going beyond the standard data replication scenarios and using SNP Glue to implement real-time architectures, where the data and events that are created in SAP would be available and integrated with other applications in the enterprise.

Alongside its proven data replication capabilities, SNP Glue supports a fully event driven architecture between on-premise SAP systems and cloud applications. This makes it the first solution to offer both data integration and event-driven integration scenarios within SAP.

A true event driven architecture 

An event driven architecture uses events to trigger and communicate between decoupled services and is common in modern applications built with microservices. An event is a change in state, “what has happened”, like an item being placed in a shopping cart on an e-commerce website. Events can either carry the state (the item purchased, its price, and a delivery address) or events can be identifiers (a notification that an order was shipped).

Event driven architectures have three key components: event producers, event routers, and event consumers. A producer publishes an event to the router, which filters and pushes the events to consumers. Producer services and consumer services are decoupled, which allows them to be scaled, updated, and deployed independently.

Below we can see an example of how an event driven architecture serves an use case of a construction company streaming the events of their products being sent to the customer sites, in order to notify their business users through a mobile application.

Now that we have some more clarity on what “event driven” means, let’s look at how SNP Glue can help us to include an SAP system into this modern architecture pattern.

This time around, we will not stream data from SAP tables but we will be listening to the events raised by the SAP Business Object framework. SNP Glue will then publish the specific messages to a message broker together with their data payload.

This approach is particularly suited for customers that:

• are looking to creating a system that would allow different applications from different platforms to integrate
• do not want to invest in recreating a data model on top of table data replicated from SAP
• are looking to implement a flexible architecture that could offer real-time insights and scale independently
• are interested in capturing specific business events and don’t need to record all changes that happen to the data in SAP

Capturing SAP Business Objects

The first new feature we are introducing is the capability to integrate data replication with the Business Objects Layer (aka SAP BO).

Within the SAP Business Workflow, a Business Object is defined as a collection of methods or events built around a business process (or entity). A few common Business Objects in an SAP system include Customer, Material, Vendors, Purchase orders etc. This enables customers and other parties to access an interface of executable methods and events and interact with SAP business processes.

We created an “event driven process”. This means that, instead of being manually executed or periodically scheduled, this data replication process can be linked to SAP Business Objects events, and it will be executed every time an event of the chosen type occurs in the SAP system.
The picture below shows how easy it is to bind SNP Glue process to a specific SAP BO event, through the following steps:

• Define the data you want so send as the body of your message, for example the sales order information related to a newly created sales order
• Link this execution to the specific business object event
• Activate the process. This will create the necessary bindings in the background and messages will start flowing from your system!

Multiple targets for maximum flexibility

There are a lot of different platforms and services enterprises can choose from to build their event driven architecture. The most notable are Apache Kafka, Confluent, Solace, Amazon Kinesis, Microsoft Events Hub or Google Cloud Dataflow. They can be grouped into two main categories: Messaging (Publisher/Subscriber) and streaming services. Which one to choose strongly depends on your specific requirements and preferences. Web resources such as Gartner can offer valuable insights.

Most of the services we mentioned offer an HTTP based interface for receiving messages and events. SNP Glue can now leverage these interfaces and integrate with event routers thanks to the multipurpose HTTP connector we have just released. The connector can be customized easily and can support many different formats and targets. You can also implement industry standards such as the CloudEvents specification: