As enterprises increasingly adopt cloud technologies to drive agility, scalability, and innovation, SAP has introduced SAP Kyma—a flexible and extensible platform designed to empower developers and organizations in their cloud-native journey. At the heart of SAP Kyma lie fundamental modern software principles such as cloud-native architecture and microservices, which transform how SAP applications are built, deployed, and managed.
This article provides an introduction to these core concepts within the context of SAP Kyma and highlights how they enable businesses to innovate faster while leveraging the power of SAP ecosystems.
SAP Kyma is an open-source project and enterprise-ready platform that runs on Kubernetes, offering a seamless way to extend and integrate applications in SAP landscapes and beyond. It provides a runtime environment where developers can build, deploy, and manage containerized microservices, serverless functions, and event-driven extensions.
Kyma's modular design supports the creation of cloud-native applications that are loosely coupled, scalable, and resilient, helping businesses respond rapidly to changing requirements.
Cloud-native is an approach to designing, building, and running applications optimized for cloud environments. It embraces principles such as:
SAP Kyma incorporates all these cloud-native principles by leveraging Kubernetes as its orchestration engine and providing built-in tooling for monitoring, logging, and managing distributed applications.
Microservices architecture breaks down applications into small, autonomous services that communicate over APIs. Each microservice encapsulates a specific business capability and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
In SAP Kyma, microservices offer the following advantages:
Kyma supports microservices through its serverless runtime (functions) and containers, enabling developers to build modular extensions that interact seamlessly with SAP systems, cloud services, or third-party APIs.
Eventing and Messaging
Kyma provides a robust eventing framework, allowing microservices to communicate asynchronously via events. This event-driven architecture enhances decoupling and responsiveness.
Service Mesh
Using Istio as a service mesh, Kyma manages secure service-to-service communication, traffic routing, load balancing, and observability for microservices.
API Gateway
Kyma includes an API gateway that handles external and internal API traffic, enabling authentication, authorization, and traffic management.
Serverless Functions
Lightweight functions enable rapid development of microservices without managing underlying infrastructure.
Integration with SAP Systems
Kyma seamlessly integrates with SAP applications like SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, enabling event-driven extensions and custom business logic.
SAP Kyma embodies the best practices of cloud-native development and microservices architecture, empowering enterprises to build modern, scalable, and maintainable applications that extend SAP’s business capabilities. By embracing these concepts, organizations can not only enhance agility and innovation but also future-proof their SAP landscapes in an increasingly cloud-centric world.