- SAP Managed Tags:
With the latest release of SAP S/4HANA 2023 edition (2308), customers can directly connect with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh (AEM) and send their business events.
The massive scaling and distributed mesh capabilities of AEM will allow customers to take their Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) to whole new levels.
For those who are already familiar with SAP S/4HANA’s event enablement framework, the channel configuration section now comes with an additional option to configure an ‘Advanced’ channel.
The ‘Advanced’ channel refers to AEM and provides users with options to configure their AEM brokers.
Creating a service key with AEM validation broker service
The connection from SAP S/4HANA to AEM happens with AEM’s validation broker service which ensures that the AEM broker being configured with SAP S/4HANA is compliant with SAP standards.
To use the validation broker, customers need to create a service instance of ‘aem-validation-service-plan’ and then create a service binding for the same.
The credentials obtained from AEM validation broker are supplied during the ‘Advanced’ channel creation on S/4.
The step-by-step procedure for service-key creation is available on SAP’s help-doc portal:
AEM validation service
Configuring an SM59 destination for channel
One of the pre-requisites to channel configuration on SAP S/4HANA is an SM59 destination where customers provide the AMQPS hostname and port for their AEM broker.
The connection type here needs to be ‘HTTP connection to External Server’.
Next, navigate to the ‘Logon & Security’ section, to choose your SSL Client PSE ID.
The SSL Client PSE ID depends on your environment and the one shown here is only for indicative purposes.
For more extensive documentation related to SM59 destination setup, refer to the guide on SAP help portal:
Configuring an SM59 destination for AEM
Configuring trust between S/4 and AEM brokers with certificate-based authentication
The event flow between SAP S/4HANA and AEM brokers is protected with certificate-based authentication and these certificates need to be configured on AEM and SAP S/4HANA.
This is the only supported means of authentication as of date.
Execute the STRUST transaction on SAP S/4HANA to open the Trust Manager.
You can choose the SSL client configured above in the SM59 destination and export its certificates to AEM.
By double clicking the subject of the certificate, its fields would be populated in the certificate section where you can find the ‘export’ option, then export the certificate in file format “Base64”.
You need to export the corresponding root certificate as well by double clicking on the root certificate under Subject -> Issuer Certificates. Then you can export it in the same way as the client certificate.
To import these certificates into AEM, log in to your AEM broker and choose ‘Manage’ > ‘Certificate Authorities’ > ‘Add Client Certificate Authority’ and paste the contents of the certificate(s) exported from S/4.
In the ‘Authentication’ section of AEM, ‘client certificate authentication’ must be enabled.
In the ‘Access Control’ section, you must not forget to create and enable a client username that matches the common name (CN) of the certificate you imported in AEM.
For more information on configuring certificates in AEM, refer:
Client certificate authentication
Configuring an ‘Advanced’ channel on SAP S/4HANA
Now, we are all set to create our channel.
Provide a channel name, description, and the name of the SM59 destination created above.
If the validation endpoint name and Oauth2 configuration name are left blank, they get auto filled by SAP S/4HANA.
The ‘number of publish connections’ refers to the number of concurrent connections that SAP S/4HANA can establish with the broker.
This channel is bidirectional in nature, which means you can use the same channel to flow events into SAP S/4HANA.
The step-by-step procedure for channel configuration is also available on SAP’s help portal:
Configuring a channel for AEM
Now, you can create outbound bindings for your channel to flow events to your AEM broker.
Creating outbound binding for Business Partner objects
To create an outbound binding for Business Partner object, choose ‘Outbound bindings’ in the Channel Configuration section.
Click on ‘create new topic binding’ and choose the relevant topic.
For example, here we have selected the ‘Business Partner’ topic to emit events related to Business Partner objects.
Choose ‘Apply’ followed by ‘Save configuration’.
With this configuration, SAP S/4HANA would emit events related to Business Partner objects to SAP Integration Suite, Advanced Event Mesh.
On your AEM broker, create a Queue, followed by a topic subscription to this Queue, you could name the subscription as ‘S/4HANA/>’ to allow publishing of events from SAP S/4HANA.
Unleash the power of AEM and scale your EDA scenarios like never before!
Visit the SAP Help Portal for AEM to learn more.
14 Comments
