SES 24: Consuming Cloud Services

SAP HANA Cloud Platform is the right fit for building composite applications within enterprise. Still, one can weave internet-based services together with the ones hosted on-premise to build a great application.

What is Connectivity Service?

It is a built-in service of SAP HCP which gives applications, the ability to connect to external internet-based services in a safe and secure way. These kind of connections are built on protocols like HTTP, SMTP & RFC. Java services can tap into the Connectivity Service with the help of an API provided with SAP HCP SDK, known as Connectivity and Destination API.

The API makes it possible to build connections in an abstract way based on Connectivity Service-specific configuration object known as destination. In the definition of a destination, you can specify all parameters used to building a connection to an internet-based or an on-premise service.

At runtime, the Connectivity service will use these details to build a connection object and give it back to application. Then, the Java application can utilize connection to access remote services and retrieve emails, just like it was running on-premise. Moreover, the Connectivity Service will step back to monitor broker connection requests, implement secure tunneling and fill other details to maintain good connection flow.

#Insight

For large-scale data, it is recommended that you take a look at SAP HANA Cloud Integration (SAP HCI), designed and developed to handle such kind of requirements!

Usage Scenarios for Connectivity Service

Service Location	Protocol	Description
Internet	HTTP	Call a web service hosted by a third-party vendor on net. Ex: REST-based service call to services provided by search engines.
Internet	POP3/ IMAP	You can use Connectivity Service to connect to an external mail server using either POP3 or IMAP protocols to fetch emails and process them.
On-Premise	HTTP	Call web services hosted on systems available on-premise. Here, services are brokered through SAP Gateway making it easy to expose existing ABAP APIs as RESTful web services.
On-Premise	RFC	You can use Connectivity Service to invoke remote-enabled function modules on ABAP using RFC. You can call custom RFC functions as required.
Internet	SMTP	Here, you can use an external mail server using SMTP protocol to send emails.