Edge Integration Cell – setup highlights

[Dimitri]

In previous blogs, I talked about the context, use cases and how the Edge Integration Cell, EIC in short, looks and feels. This blog will bring insights in the setup. It is not a manual, obviously. But it provides tips and tricks to give you a better understanding of what should be done to set up and configure the EIC. Please refer to the official SAP documentation about this topic. It provides all the necessary steps.

Prepare

Before you start installing, you need to decide where the EIC must run. SAP Note 3247839 provides the necessary information. Also, please check region availability via OSS Note 3379690.
During the beta phase of the EIC, I chose the AWS setup (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with Kubernetes 1.23.x on Amazon Web Services). The continuation of this blog is therefore based on that.

Deploy

Once SAP provisioned the capability for you (a new runtime will be added, see screenshot below), you can activate it. Make sure to grant roles integration_provisioner and EdgeLMAccess to the user performing this action. The screenshot below is the result of all actions mentioned in the documentation.

During the installation and configuration, an important part is enabling central system monitoring. Here, you need to set up your SAP Identity Authentication Service (IAS) accordingly. Setup is out-of-the-box, except for the default assertion attributes.

Standard configuration:

Configuration as we have it now:

Another part of the setup is getting the kubeconfig file. This is a file that is used to configure access to clusters. This is a generic way of referring to configuration files. You need to upload this file as one step in the configuration wizard.

Further down the installation, you need to run the Edge Lifecycle Management Bridge to establish the connection between the Edge Lifecycle Management and the Edge Node using the Cloud Connector. Edge Lifecycle Management Bridge deploys Kubernetes resources under namespace edgelm.
The result of this action is that you see the new Edge Node displayed in Edge Lifecycle Management UI, and additional Kubernetes resources are deployed automatically before the status of the Edge Node shows Available.

Important to mention here is that you need to Install AWS CLI (command line interface) first. Afterwards, you can execute command aws configure.
During this step, you also need to download software from the SAP support portal. Make sure you always download the latest version. Execute command <executable name> run init -c context.cfg
When that one finishes, you will get a nice and clear summary of all actions performed. Save that XML file for documentation purposes.

You now go back to your Integration Suite tenant, open the Edge Lifecycle Management user interface, go to the Edge Nodes tab and deploy the solution. In case of success, the result should look similar to the screenshot below.

Upgrade

To make sure the EIC remains in a healthy status, upgrades can be performed. The same applies to your Kubernetes Cluster.

Use a Kubernetes version supported by both the old and the new versions of Edge Integration Cell. SAP Note 3247839 provides insights. If the Kubernetes version isn't supported by the new Edge Integration Cell version, you have to upgrade Kubernetes. The Kubernetes upgrade process depends on your Kubernetes provider. See the respective documentation about how to upgrade.

Upgrading the EIC is really easy. If an upgrade is available, it's visible in the Edge Lifecycle Management UI. Just click on upgrade, next to the component.