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Hi, my name is Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
You are watching a video tutorial that is part of a series about the SAP Business Technology
Platform, SAP Extension Suite certification.
The topic of this tutorial is the SAP Cloud Connector.
This video was recorded in May 2022.
For the latest tutorials on the topic, please check the playlist.
As a reminder, we covered this in the introduction, here are the topic areas of the certification.
Connectivity is listed with a 6% weight; about 5 questions.
In the Learning content this is covered in the unit External Services, covering an exercise,
how to use an external service with Cloud Application Programming model (CAP), Describing
BTP Connectivity, and Using the SAP Cloud Connector, the topic of this video.
Connectivity is documented in a separate guide, SAP BTP Connectivity, on the SAP Help Portal.
When you print it out, as PDF, it is a good 700 pages.
Fairly extensive topic, in other words, but for the exam you are not expected to have
mastered all of this.
What you do need to know is that there are two types of connectivity: internet and cloud
to on-premises.
For internet, to connect to a remote service hosted somewhere publically, we need to create
and configure an instance of the Destination service in a BTP subaccount.
For cloud to on-premises, in addition to a destination service, we also need to install
and configure a Cloud Connector to establish a secure tunnel using TLS (transport layer
security) encryption over HTTP.
TLS is the next-gen of what used to be called SSL (secure sockets layer).
Supported protocols are HTTP, well, HTTPS more likely, and RFC for ABAP function modules.
Here we have a Windows client computer on which we have installed the SAP Cloud Connector.
It is a Java application, which requires the installation of a Java runtime (SDK or JRE).
You need to run the go command in a command prompt and connect to the Cloud Connector
in a browser.
Using secure HTTPS port 8443, comes out-of-the-box with a self-signed certificate, hence the
“not secure” warning.
For production systems, you would use properly signed certificates.
You connect the Cloud Connector to an BTP subaccount, adding region, subacount, with
credentials.
This will then be listed in the main menu (and header).
This provides, what’s called fine-grained access control, the tunnel, with the Cloud
Connector running as an agent.
When we then navigate to our BTP subaccount, Connectivity.
We can see the Cloud Connectors listed.
There is no configuration menu here, except for Force Disconnect, showing connected Cloud
Connector instances with associated back-end systems.
No back-end systems are configured for this connector.
This we would need to do here, Cloud to on-premises: ABAP, HANA, AS Java, Process Integration,
Gateway, other, or non-SAP, or on-premises to cloud, from the perspective
of the Cloud Connector, HANA Cloud, VM, or ABAP Cloud, as service channel.
There is monitor view for both connection types and an audit log, so we know exactly
what has happened with access to log and trace files.
For the connector, we can view the security status, and as mentioned, out-of-the-box there
is some work to be done.
Alerting with observation configuration.
High availability, we can enable this when we have configured an additional cloud connector
instance, otherwise, for production environments, the Cloud Connector could be a single point
of failure.
Hardware metrics, for the computer running the cloud connector and a configuration menu.
We are connected here as administrator, you need to logon to the tool and we can connect
and disconnect subaccounts.
The cloud connector is available for download from the SAP Developments Tools website (although
it is more an operations tool) for Linux, macOS, and Windows with the SAP JVM.
This is the same site as covered in the Tools tutorial for the Cloud Foundry CLI.
How to install and configure the Cloud Connector is documented in the BTP Connectivity Guide.
Make sure to take note of the Context section, Advantages, Basic scenarios: connection cloud
applications to systems on-premises and connecting on-premises tools to SAP HANA database, for
example (although applies more to the SAP HANA service in the Neo enviroment), Extended
scenarios, How to install, Configure, and administrate the connector with all the specifics
about security, but again, no need to study all 700 pages, just the concepts, and a general
understanding about how to work with the cloud connector suffices.
For the latest information about the Cloud Connector, you can follow the tag on the SAP
Community.
Here’s a article about the latest release update, for example.
You can find the links to the resources mentioned in the description of this video below.
This video tutorial was recorded by Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
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