Hi, my name is Denys van Kempen SAP HANA Academy and SAP’s Partner Innovation Lab
In this video tutorial series we are going to explore the Kyma runtime of the SAP Business
Technology platform.
This video was recorded in January 2022.
For the latest tutorials on the topic, please check the playlist.
In this video, part one, we briefly cover some of the concepts and documentation.
We are going to assume you are little bit familiar with the Business Technology Platform,
but if not, no worries, you will find a link to our onboarding tutorial series in the description
below.
SAP Help Portal, the documentation, always a good place to start
Most links on the home page point to a single document.
You can print out the PDF, but don’t read it cover to cover, it is about 3,000 pages,
better use it as a reference.
Under environments we find the Kyma environment.
It is a managed service of the open-source Kyma project.
a cloud-native solution, which allows developers to extend SAP solutions with serverless functions
and combine them with containerized microservices.
We can see this illustrated on the kyma-proejct.io website.
In a nutshell, with a Kyma runtime running inside, or on top if you prefer, a Kubernetes
cluster.
You can deploy Kyma open-source yourself, create your own Kubernetes cluster or use
a managed cluster from a hyperscaler, and then it is your job to keep everything up
and running, or you can consume Kyma as a managed service of the Business Technology
Platform and have this taken care off by SAP.
There is a Kyma dashboard, we will see this in action and a Kyma CLI but this is used
to install and upgrade the Kyma cluster, part of SAP’s responsabilities, as mentioned,
as managed service.
In green, our app, containerized microservices and/or lamba functions with some of the Kyma
components: serverless, eventing, service integrations, observability, monitoring, tracing,
logging, that is, the service mesh, so all components can talk to each other, and an
API gateway.
This is an simplification, of course, there is a bit more to it.
For the details, you can consult the Kyma documentation.
Here we find the objective restated.
The different components are listed here, some are open-source, for observability, Kyma
is using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Jaeger, Kiali, all CNCF, Cloud Native Compute Foundation
projects, for the service mesh, Istio is used with envoy, for the API gateway, Gardener
in part, another SAP open source project, and for eventing NATS, although on the Business
Technology Platform you can also configure Kyma to use SAP Event Mesh.
Back to the Help Portal.
Note that the Kyma runtime and Kyma open source are not completely identical, there are some
slightly different functionalities.
The available regions where you can create a subaccount are listed here, we are still
in the same document, Time of recording, we have 5 for Azure, 8
for AWS, and a single one for Google Cloud, just recently added.
Any new regions will be listed on the roadmap.
Then there are also cluster regions.
This is where the Kubernetes cluster will be created.
So, unlike with the Cloud Foundry environment there is no 1:1 mapping.
You can create a Kubernetes cluster in Europe for Google Cloud even though the subaccount
is created in the US.
You can also create multiple clusters for a single subaccount.
With some informateion here about High Availability and Disaster Recovery.
Under Getting Started, we find the overall approach, the big picture
We need to create the Kyma environment, assign roles to allow administrators to manage Kyma
and developers to access the cluster, register SAP systems, and these are all administration
tasks, and then it is up to the developer to start creating the microservices and functions.
Here in the Development section, we can find the type of systems currently available
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Field Service Management and SuccessFactors, both cloud-native solution;
SuccessFactors was a very early adopter of Cloud Foundry back in 2011,
Kyma has its roots in Hybris, so we also find the Customer Experience (CX) solutions Commerce
Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Cloud for Customer listed
Language of choice, any langauge you want for the microservices, it is Kubernetes after
all, but for the functions we are restrricted to Node and Python.
There is a dashboard for administration, we will see this in action, but you can also
use kubectl to connect to the cluster, we will take a look at this as well.
As a reminder, the Business Technology Platform Kyma runtime is a managed service, so we cannot
directly access the Kubernetes cluster created using the AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud console.
Upgrades, backups, monitoring of the control plane and nodes of the kubernetes clusters;
this is all taken care off by SAP.
We do have some configuration options but for this we need to use the Business Technology
Platform Cockpit or the Kyma Dashboard.
Some tutorials for the developers, pointing to the SAP Developer Center
And there is more, on GitHub, in the SAP-samples repository
Then there is also an entry in the SAP Discovery Center with information about pricing, and
a cost estimator.
There is a free tier and a trial service plan (time of recording).
DIscover center missions, which provide a guided approach to explore some of the functionality.
Getting started, for example With an example use case using a lambda function
and microservice hosted in the Kyma environment interactiing with SAP cloud applications and
hyperscaler services.
From the discovery center we can also access the roadmap, showing functionality coming
up.
With a link to the Road Map Explorer where you can you can save and share and explore
any of the other zillion SAP products OK enough talk, so much for our brief tour,
in the next video, we will get hands-on and create a Kyma cluster.
This video tutorial was recorded by Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy / SAP Partner
Innovation Lab Any good?
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