External Applications using HCP

[Former Member]

Hi,

I am curious if it makes sense to build application architecture which uses HCP (Hana Cloud Platform) as a data and analytic layer while building Application/Business/UI layers using other technologies (e.g. .Net, ASP.NET MVC etc) and therefor hosted on other servers and in different data centers (e.g. Azure, Amazon etc)?

To connect to HCP from external system we would need to deal with db-tunnel connection (neo open-db-tunnel) which makes it a bit cumbersome to maintain and latency is relatively higher comparing to e.g. if would be hosted in the same data center (e.g. Hana Azure Cloud ).

In other words does it make sense to build sophisticated applications outside HCP?

Or once you use HCP you are married with all technology stack SAP offers, e.g. SAPUI5, XS etc hosted on HCP

Thanks

Artem

[Former Member]

I think it is a great question, albeit i am picking up on it a bit late. The blog post by Matthias Steiner back in 2014 alluded to this in part - but it presents a good question when you have solutions that have no particular need to HANA itself but perhaps make calls to SAP or are themselves called by SAP but are perhaps happily accommodated on something like Azure or Amazon.

These solutions could be pretty much anything. I am not sure that I understand the complexities, challenges or performance/authorization issues that might arise by making use of a 'storm' of clouds to support your business' IT solutions but I would also guess that if there is the slightest sniff of performance issues between the cloud providers you will land up with a battle trying to work out who is accountable and responsible for quality of service.

I wonder if any of the dear readers know of actual customer case studies that are blended cloud implementations? Where the SAP infrastructure is talking to other infrastructure in another part of the cloud and the users are all fondling the data in both systems from on-premise.

[Former Member]

It seems latest version of Hana Cloud Connector (2.5.1) now also supports db-tunnel and controls its lifetime. So if connection is dropped it will automatically re-establish it.

This of course doesn't solve latency issue, but at least makes setup valid for production use

[Vitaliy-R]

Hello Artem.

My understanding is as following:

- If you need HCP (as a platform) then you better with technologies it is supporting out-of-the-box. Today those are Java and XS (JavaScript). More to come, but I cannot share any specific plans here...

- If you need only HANA as a platform then indeed you can host its instance in the public cloud (I am not sure if productive instances are available already in Azure via cal.sap.com...)

Regards,

-Vitaliy

[Former Member]

Hi Artem,

I just want to mention that besides XS, you can also build Java applicaitons on HCP. You can have a look at SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Best regards,

Wenjun

[Former Member]

Hi Wenjun,

Yes, this option is clear.

The question is exactly about non HCP hosted business applications. Unfortunately HCP does not offer building .Net based application hosted there. E.g. in case we have a lot experience and know hows in .Net environment and would like to stay as professionals there and with HANA being hosted in Azure it was a good fit for us. But now considering migrating to HCP poses us question if HCP is at all designed/suitable to be used externally with the same effectiveness. Currently it doesn't seem so to me. Of course there are means to connect to HCP from external network though vpn channel, but would one really consider building a complex performance critical business application outside HANA Cloud Platform?

Thanks

Artem