In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises demand agile, scalable, and cloud-native solutions to extend and integrate their SAP systems with modern technologies. SAP Kyma emerges as a powerful open-source platform designed to enable developers and organizations to build, extend, and operate intelligent applications on Kubernetes, seamlessly integrating with SAP’s cloud ecosystem.
This article provides an introduction to SAP Kyma, highlighting its overview and key concepts, and how it fits into the broader SAP landscape.
SAP Kyma is an open-source project and a cloud-native runtime environment built on Kubernetes that enables the development and operation of modern applications and microservices. It offers a flexible platform for building event-driven, extensible, and scalable applications that can integrate deeply with SAP solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), and third-party services.
Kyma simplifies cloud-native development by providing a rich set of pre-integrated components, developer tools, and runtime features on top of Kubernetes, enabling businesses to innovate rapidly without sacrificing the stability and security of their SAP landscapes.
At its core, Kyma runs on Kubernetes clusters, orchestrating containerized applications and microservices. This foundation provides resilience, scalability, and declarative infrastructure management.
Kyma supports both microservices and serverless functions, enabling lightweight, event-driven development. Developers can deploy standalone microservices or small functions that react to events, optimizing resource usage.
A cornerstone of Kyma is its event-driven architecture. Kyma’s eventing system enables services to subscribe to and react to events emitted by SAP systems or other sources. This allows decoupled, asynchronous communication which improves system responsiveness and scalability.
Kyma integrates with Istio, a service mesh technology that manages secure service-to-service communication, traffic management, and observability across microservices.
Kyma provides API gateway capabilities and API lifecycle management tools, enabling secure exposure and consumption of APIs from SAP or external systems.
Kyma serves as an extensibility platform, allowing developers to create extensions for SAP applications without changing their core codebase. This preserves upgradeability while enabling custom innovations.
Kyma offers comprehensive developer tools, including CLI, dashboards, and runtime logs. It supports common programming languages and frameworks, easing the onboarding process and accelerating development cycles.
SAP Kyma is a vital component of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) ecosystem, especially within the Kyma Runtime option. It complements other SAP services like SAP Integration Suite, SAP Extension Suite, and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model by providing a cloud-native foundation for custom extensions and integrations.
SAP Kyma is a transformative technology that empowers organizations to build scalable, resilient, and extensible applications in the cloud-native era. By leveraging Kubernetes, event-driven architectures, and seamless SAP integration, Kyma enables enterprises to innovate rapidly while maintaining the robustness of their core SAP systems.
For SAP developers and architects, understanding Kyma’s core concepts is essential for designing future-ready SAP extensions and integrations that drive business agility and digital transformation.