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Event-driven architectures are one of the hottest topics in the software industry. Not surprisingly, since EDAs provide substantial benefits like real time updates, optimized business processes or loose coupling - and major mid to long term cost savings.
Events
Events ("significant changes") in these architectures originate from event sources like SAP S/4HANA or SAP SuccessFactors. Once they occur, events are handed over to event brokers that distribute these events to interested event consumers.
For an introduction to the topic check out our Learning Journey.
SAP offers wonderful event brokers with the outstanding SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh as our go to offering for customers that are serious about event-driven integration, and look for features, scale and full integration into SAP's event-driven ecosystem.
SAP Event Sources
When I started with EDA seven or eight years ago, the main challenge had been to find suitable events. SAP S/4HANA back then already provided a smaller number of standard events to leverage for your use cases. Nevertheless, those events back then had neither been adjustable nor extensible. So, often you were not able to implement a use case due to a lack of a suitable event.
Over the last years this has changed. Now you can find more than 600 standard events in your SAP S/4HANA, based on RAP. And in the newer SAP S/4HANA versions these events are extensible and adjustable. Plus that you can build your own custom events using RAP in these versions.
So, you would think that all was great on the event source side. Unfortunately, this was not the case. For older backends the challenge still remained. SAP ECC does not provide any standard events at all. Older SAP S/4HANA versions did not allow for the creation of custom events.
Now, there is SAP AIF.
SAP Application Interface Framework
SAP Application Interface Framework enables you to develop and monitor interfaces as well as execute error handling in a single framework residing in your SAP back end system. It is based on SAP NetWeaver technology and can therefore work for legacy systems as well.
Specifically, AIF allows for both SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA backends:
- To use a powerful framework for the implementation of interfaces and the logic behind
- To monitor interfaces with different interface technologies (e.g. Idocs, ABAP Proxies)
To learn more on AIF check Gautham's great blog.
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is SAP’s main event broker/mesh offering. It is a leading best of breed event broker with almost no scale limits since you can scale either by adding more brokers to the mesh or by increasing the broker size of the individual brokers. It provides a myriad of sophisticated features for state of the art business EDA and is geared towards data & notification events, and 3rd party integration. AEM grows with customer needs from small to extremely large event meshes.
AEM is future-ready for real-time AI and employee initiated EDA. Go for it and most likely there will be no need to ever change your broker technology again.
AIFAEM
So, AEM is SAP’s main event broker/mesh offering. AIF is being used by thousands of SAP customers as of today.
Doesn't it sound like the natural choice to allow older SAP backends to expose custom events based on SAP AIF to SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh? This is exactly what the new AIF software component AIFAEM does.
AIFAEM Features
Using the new AIFAEM software component of AIF, custom events can be created to be exposed via SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh from both SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA systems. This means that AIFAEM offers:
- Creation of custom events based for SAP backends including SAP S/4HANA and SAP ECC
- Event creation can be based on for example BOR objects and IDocs
- Support of CloudEvents format
- Sophisticated structure mapping
- Event connectivity to SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh
- Monitoring and Error Handling Integration (Transaction /AIF/ERR and SAP Fiori Message Monitoring App)
Supported Releases for AIFAEM
Supported releases for AIFAEM are:
- SAP NW 7.31 (ECC)
- SAP NW 7.55 (S/4 HANA 2020) and following
AIFAEM is delivered as ABAP Add-On downloadable by customers
- AIFAEM731: for SAP NW 7.31
- AIFAEM800: for SAP NW 7.55, and subsequent releases
Commercials for AIFAEM
This is actually the nicest part: usage of AIFAEM is included with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh.
Additional Information
I understand that there are probably plenty of questions on your side. When do you use AIF in comparison to the standard events, at least in S/4HANA where both are available? How do you get started? Is there any guidance on how to create events?
Answers to these questions will come in the next days and weeks, in additional blogs and additional material.
As a starting point have a look at the note for AIFAEM.
What I can highly recommend to you as well to get a first impression of the process of creating an event with AIF and exposing it via AEM, is to have look at this blog. Christian walks you through an example of a (classic) BusinessPartner.changed event with a not so classic event type: aif.businesspartner.change. This is not the final approach, it does give you a first impression though.
As said, there is more to come in the next weeks.
Summary
Let me summarize the important points again:
- AIFAEM is available from today and allows to expose events from SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA
- It works with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh and the usage is included
- It is a good choice for older backends and specifically for existing AIF customers
- It allows for the exposure of custom notification and custom data events
- The event creation is primarily code template based
- It includes the great AIF monitoring support
And we highly recommend to stay tuned for more enablement material on AIFAEM to come in the next weeks.
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