Introducing New Features and Innovations of SAP Integration Suite, Advanced Event Mesh

As of April 2024, new features and innovations of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh have been published.

1. Incorporation of latest Innovations

Even though EDA is not a brand-new technology, its rate of innovation is still high. One example is Distributed Tracing which allows customers monitor and troubleshoot complex distributed systems including event producers, event consumers, and the event mesh (network of event brokers) in between. Additionally, some use cases (for example, Replay) require buffering of events over a given timeframe, which requires additional message spool size on the event broker.

These new innovations are now available to AEM customers.

2. Further simplification of licensing

The different options (aka Deployment Regions) to deploy SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh are important to satisfy various customer requirements, and they continue to be available to AEM customers. However, from a licensing perspective customer were confused to pick and choose between the different options available. In addition, these deployment options were being charged monthly whereas the brokers themselves were being charged hourly. We have now bundled deployment regions into the event brokers, meaning technically the choice between the different options is still available but there is no additional cost associated with it anymore.

3. Additional ways to license SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh

Consumption-based licensing is a great way for customers to adopt a new technology like EDA, especially if they can’t really estimate future consumption patterns, impact of new use cases etc. etc. A breathing infrastructure prevents over-investment and under-provisioning respectively.

However, some customers are very well able to predict their future workloads and therefore consumption patterns. These customers typically prefer subscriptions for one or more years over purely consumption-based licensing to minimize their overall TCO (think of reserved instances on hyperscalers). Subscription-based licensing is now available for AEM customers in addition to consumption-based licensing.

There is a lot to unpack in the changes mentioned above, especially the new features and innnovations. Let’s look at them in detail.

1. Distributed Tracing

Imagine you have a large e-commerce platform with multiple microservices handling various functions such as user authentication, product catalog management, order processing, and payment processing. Each of these microservices communicates with each other over a network.

Now, suppose a user reports that they are experiencing slow checkout times when trying to place an order. Without distributed tracing, identifying the root cause of the problem can be challenging because there are multiple interconnected components involved.

When distributed tracing is enabled, the event broker generates special guaranteed messages when certain operations happen. The publisher and subscriber APIs also generate spans when messages are sent and received. Open Telemetry receivers then consume these messages from a particular queue and convert them to a format that can be received, processed, and viewed using common Open Telemetry back-ends such as Jaeger and DataDog.

This enables end-2-end tracing and visualization of events across multiple applications and event brokers to identify bottlenecks, perform Root Cause Analysis and general optimizations and improvements.

2. Additional Spool Size

A common use case for extending the available Message Spool size is message replay. An example would be a financial institution that is required by regulatory authorities to keep a detailed record of all trading activities for compliance reasons, and message replay allows the complete reconstruction of the entire sequence of trading events. To enable message replay oftentimes additional storage (Spool) needs to be leveraged.

3. Bundling of Deployment Regions

Choosing the right deployment option is a critical part of building a well-design event-driven application. Operational cost, location, resource provisioning, configuration management, security and other concerns are important factors to consider when selecting a deployment solution.

Following options are available:

• Public Region: Dedicated event broker services are deployed in SAP-controlled shared VPC/VNets on public cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure.
• Dedicated Regions: Dedicated event broker services are deployed in SAP-controlled VPC/VNets dedicated to the customer on public cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• Customer Private Regions: Dedicated event broker services are deployed in a customer's on-premises or cloud-based Kubernetes cluster, such as OpenShift, Rancher (RKE1), Amazon (EKS), Azure (AKS, ARO), Google (GKE), Alibaba (ACK), Huawei (CCE)

All these options above are available to both Default Service Plan as well as Standard Service Plan customers, only for Standard Service Plan customers there is additional monthly charge.

The enhancements introduced in February 2024 are now available via the new Standard Service Plan. The older version of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, via the default plan, is still available for customers with a few caveats (more on this further below).

Note, that Customer Private Region as well as Dedicated Region are still available to Standard Plan customers, there is just no additional cost anymore.

With all the additional innovations available to AEM customers, simplifications on the one hand and additional options on the other, it is recommended to choose the Standard Plan for all SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh customers going forward.

However, if you already have a deployment based on the Default Plan, we encourage you to migrate to the new service plan as soon as possible. There is no technical impact to help you plan your migration to the new service plan when it is convenient for you. The Default plan will be deprecated later this year and will not receive any of the new innovations.

As of October, 2024 existing Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) customers are able to deploy new Default Service Plan brokers until their CPEA contract renewal date. After this contract renewal, they cannot deploy new brokers on the Default service plan. But the already running brokers are not impacted and will continue to run till you decide to decommission and upgrade to the brokers from Standard plan.