It has been more than a year since SAP C/4HANA was released last year, and practitioners of C/4HANA must have some idea of the product set contained in these five clouds.

Jerry notes that the concept of SAP C/4HANA Foundation has been widely mentioned in English SAP blogs, but there is a lack of Chinese blogs talking about it. So Jerry contributed one.

SAP C/4HANA practitioners know that some of the products in these five clouds are developed by SAP itself, such as ABAP Netweaver based Marketing Cloud and Cloud for Customer. Others are products with different technology stacks and architectures that SAP has acquired in recent years.

In terms of functions, C/4HANA meets the core demands of customers in the field of Customer Experience. However, behind the powerful functions of C/4HANA, its product set technology stack and architecture are different. In addition, the characteristics of C/4HANA cloud products make C/4HANA customers It cannot be implemented as in the past with traditional ABAP Netweaver based products.

As an undergraduate operating Systems major, Jerry learned this quote from software engineering guru David Wheeler: “Any problem in computer science can be solved by adding an indirect middle layer.”

SAP C/4HANA architects also follow this principle — between C/4HANA five clouds and users, add a technology layer, through this additional abstraction layer, reduce the complexity of customers using C/4HANA, while improving the openness and scalability of C/4HANA.

The BLOG on the SAP community introducing the C/4HANA Foundation uses a familiar scene from a bar. Customers come to the bar for drinks and want to listen to different styles of music. Bar DJS play (mix songs, etc.) according to the needs of different clients.

To take this example as an analogy, the customers who go to the bar to drink and listen to music are SAP C/4HANA customers. The disc played by the bar stereo is C/4HANA Five Clouds, and the DJ is C/4HANA Foundation. Both perform the same job – to orchestration music from different discs (five clouds) and eventually to be used by customers in a unified way.

Specifically for the C/4HANA Foundation, SAP wants this technology layer to accomplish the following missions:

  1. To provide customers with a solid infrastructure, according to their actual business can quickly realize the corresponding business model;
  2. To provide customers with a unified management of the heterogeneous complexity of C/4HANA five clouds, reducing users’ learning and o&M costs.

Part of C/4HANA Foundation

According to Thomas Hertz’s blog Introducing SAP C/4HANA Foundation, which was posted on The SAP community and linkedin community on May 6, Currently C/4HANA Foundation includes C/4HANA Cockpit and SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory.

These two modules jointly realize the three function management of C/4HANA described in SAP official documents, that is, authorization management, security management and extension management.

C/4HANA cockpit

For those of you who have used SAP Cloud Platform cockpit, the analogy is C/4HANA Cockpit is a browser-based console that provides a unified gateway to the system for C/4HANA users.

Customers automatically gain access to C/4HANA Foundation Cockpit once they purchase a product specified in SAP C/4HANA Suite.

The details of this order can be found on SAP’s official website:

After the customer purchases the C/4HANA Suite product listed in the above list, SAP triggers the C/4HANA Foundation configuration process. When this process is complete, the user specified in the purchase contract will receive a welcome email containing the address of C/4HANA Cockpit.

Log in to C/4HANA Cockpit to manage permissions, assign user permissions, create Extensibility runtime, and more.

In the flowchart above, the last column illustrates the benefits of using C/4HANA Foundation for administrators and developers.

Jerry’s previous article on public account has introduced the relationship between SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory and Kyma, which is an open source project based on Kubernetes promoted by SAP. The former is an enterprise-level commercial solution built by SAP on the basis of the latter.

One of the differences between enterprise applications and open source projects is security and ease of use. The Kyma project home page maintains detailed instructions on how to install the standalone version of Kyma based on Minikube locally and on clusters such as GKE(Google Kubernetes Engine) and AKS(Azure Kubernetes Service). However, Kyma is a combination of open source projects including Kubernetes, Istio, Dex, Prometheus, etc., and the installation process inevitably encountered various bugs (Jerry’s experience).

After using C/4HANA Foundation, we only need to configure GCP or Azure running Kubernetes cluster and C/4HANA Foundation to trust each other, and then we can use the runtime configuration function of C/4HANA. Complete the Extension Factory configuration steps in one click.

At present, there are 16 solutions developed by SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory in SAP Application Center.

I hope this article has helped you get a basic idea of the C/4HANA Foundation. Thank you for reading.

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