Describing SAP’s Event-Driven Ecosystem

With SAP's leading role in respect to business software and the fact that more than seventy percent of the world's business transactions in one way or the other touch an SAP system, it is not surprising that SAP has had a strong focus on establishing an event-driven ecosystem that puts all the EDA benefits to play for the advantage of SAP customers.

Quite often people only see the event brokers when discussing EDAs. This is not the reality, the event broker is the engine. Without sufficient event sources and events, without consumers, without enablement and know how build up, the event broker is simply useless. So it takes this entire ecosystem, and like with an iceberg, the main part of the event-driven ecosystem typically remains under the surface. Let us now make the entire ecosystem visible.

SAP's event-driven ecosystem consists of event sources that typically are SAP back-ends, event infrastructure consisting of different event-brokers and event bridging and integration offerings, event consumers that facilitate using event-driven architecture and that allow to execute on business events, and lots of enablement options and guidance.

SAP provides a large number of events originating from different event-enabled back-ends. As a rule of thumb, most events are exposed following the CloudEvents standard, that aims to describe events in a common format across vendor boundaries. Exception from the rule are SAP SuccessFactors solutions that currently do not support CloudEvents.

The event sources will be discussed in more detail in Unit 2.

As mentioned in the overview of event-driven architectures, event brokers are intermediaries that broker and manage events. Typically, event brokers come with different feature sets, targeting everything from simple extension use cases to highly sophisticated integration use cases. SAP offers two event brokers that complement each other: SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh are SAP's event brokers.

SAP Event Mesh provides a low entry barrier to event-driven architectures with pay per use-based pricing and an event-broker-as-a-service approach. The goal is to allow you to get started as quickly and easily as possible.

SAP Event Mesh is an SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) service and therefore deployed on SAP BTP. It is the native event broker for SAP S/4HANA and the add-on for event enablement is, if needed, included in the capacity-based pricing of SAP Event Mesh.

The main use case is the integration and extension of SAP back-ends and business applications, inside and beyond the SAP ecosystem. SAP Event Mesh offers openness and focus at the same time by supporting open standards and providing extra benefits for the SAP ecosystem.

SAP Event Mesh scales well with certain set limits that result from the event-broker-as-a-service approach.

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is an offering that complements SAP Event Mesh for more demanding scenarios and is a full blown, general purpose Event Mesh. SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh offers enterprise-grade performance, reliability, security and governance, and scales to very large use cases.

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh offers deployment options across different hyperscalers and in private cloud environments. It can be configured to form a distributed mesh of event brokers deployed across environments in private or public clouds.

It also offers a full purpose set of eventing services including event streaming, event management and monitoring and on top advanced features like dynamic message routing and fine-grained filtering.

SAP Integration Suite does not only provide eventing brokering infrastructure, it consumes events as well for different purposes like feeding these events into some of the services it offers. SAP Extension Suite contains services that allow for consuming events like for example SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP), that is event-enabled to a large extent. Then, there are a number of BTP services and apps that consume events, and there is Project "Kyma" which is SAP's offering to build serverless functions and microservices in a cloud native way. Project "Kyma" can act as an event consumer and as an event source. The same holds true for SAP Data Intelligence.

All in all, the event infrastructure comes together with the event consumers and the event sources, making up the intelligent enterprise event-driven architecture of SAP. First, the SAP Business Technology Platform acts as the event infrastructure and has the service SAP Integration Suite as event consumer incorporated. SAP Integration Suite incorporates SAP Event Mesh, Event mediation and orchestration. Moreover, SAP Integration Suite builds the basis for SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh for streaming message routing, holding mesh management and providing the event portal. Then, there are event sources like cloud solutions from SAP and SAP on-premise solutions which hold extensible standard events, based on ABAP RESTful application programming model. Lastly, third party software can be part of the architecture which will be provided with a smooth crossing of vendor boundaries.

SAP has established an event-driven ecosystem to take advantage of event-driven architecture (EDA) for the benefit of its customers, with a focus on event sources, event brokers, and event consumers. SAP's event-driven ecosystem includes event sources such as SAP back-ends, event infrastructure with event brokers and integration offerings, and event consumers that facilitate the use of event-driven architecture. SAP also offers event brokers such as SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, and event consumers such as SAP Extension Suite and Project "Kyma". Together, these components make up the Intelligent Enterprise Event-Driven Architecture of SAP, which allows for seamless integration and communication across different systems and applications.

In the next unit, you will learn more about the features and capabilities of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh.