First of all, it should be said that the SAP Cloud Extension Factory is not strictly a product. Due to the use of several technologies (partly also Open Source such as Kubernetes, Kyma Runtime), it is more of a framework and includes all necessary modules for the creation, execution, and management of extensions within the SAP portfolio. In the C/4HANA area, the following standard products are currently supported in production (as of February 2020):
- SAP Commerce Cloud
Starting with version 1808, the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory can be integrated in the „public cloud“ to implement cloud-native extensions based on Kyma.
- SAP Cloud for Customer (SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud)
Since August 2019, it has been possible to connect the SAP Cloud for Customer with the Extension Factory and, thus, extend it by reacting to events.
- SAP Field Service Management (SAP Service Cloud)
Since August 2019, it has also been possible to enhance SAP Field Service Management with the help of the Extension Factory.
Further standard SAP C/4HANA products are currently being tested and will certainly be able to be integrated productively very soon. These include SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Qualtrics, and SAP Litmos.
How is the SAP Extension Factory structured?
The SAP C/4HANA Cockpit gives administrators and developers central access to the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory.
Here, administrators have the option of using the so-called „Central Management Plane“ to initially use the cloud provider of their choice. However, only Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure are currently supported. Amazon Web Services and all major cloud providers are already in the planning stage.
Furthermore, administrators can connect their SAP products in just a few steps, by generating a token for each system which can then be exchanged with the corresponding application (e.g. SAP Commerce Cloud). Thus, the applications are securely connected to the SAP Cloud Platform Extension and can make their events and APIs (services) available.
Administrators can access the Service Catalog from the KYMA Console: it provides all services of the connected systems. Developers have the option to use additional service brokers to integrate other service sources (such as databases of the cloud provider).
Developers can use the KYMA Console to react to registered events of the connected systems and use their API. This can be achieved via so-called „serverless function“ (Lambdas) as well as via microservices integration. Therefore, it is possible to extend the connected systems really quickly and easily and to integrate additional systems without having to adapt the core application itself (side-by-side extension). Possible deployment scenarios related to the SAP Commerce Cloud are as follows:
- Order validation
- Fraud check
- Price / Promotion calculation
- Voucher validation
- Payment processing
- Authorization handling
- Etc.
Further information can be found here:
- https://help.sap.com/viewer/7b98ddc13f8d4a3ba08a74042a0baa7f/Cloud/en-US/346864df64f24011b49abee07bbd79af.html
- https://blogs.sap.com/2019/06/06/sap-c4hana-extensibility-101-sap-cloud-platform-extension-factory-kyma-price-and-support/
- https://blogs.sap.com/2020/01/17/sap-c-4hana-extensibility-summary-of-whats-available-as-of-january-2020/
- https://blogs.sap.com/2019/09/10/sap-c4hana-extensibility-getting-started/
