This document summarizes a company's journey developing a product on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. It describes the goals of building experience with new technologies, discusses challenges faced with tool stability, SAP HANA instability early on, and a lack of documentation. It looks back on improvements over time but notes the platform still has room for growth and integration challenges. The summary concludes the journey provided lessons for skill needs and developer productivity when transitioning to working with new technologies.

1. .consulting .solutions .partnership
SAP HANA Cloud Platform
A Travel Report

2. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Agenda
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1. Why did we do the HCP Journey?
2. Let’s talk about the Journey
3. Looking back … and forward

3. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Disclaimer
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• No code snippets
• No life hacking
• Just a man and the plain truth 
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

4. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Why did we do the HCP Journey?
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• Goal: develop a (partner) product in the HCP
 Professional Business Software Development
• Getting real life experience
• Checking the maturity of new technologies
• And … curiosity: we wanted to do some development at the (b)leading edge

5. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
What did we want to build?
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• Application using the HCP with:
 UI5 Apps available in the Fiori Launchpad
 Business Logic is implemented as SAP HANA Native Application (XS Classic)
 Using some HANA features namely: Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) and Text Analytics
• Usage scenario of HCP: PaaS (including Infrastructure, Database) + Business Service

6. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Let’s talk about the Journey
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Image courtesy of anankkml at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Start: Q2/2015 – End: Q2/2016
Team Size: 3

7. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 1: Get a Productive HCP
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8. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 1: Get a Productive HCP – Experience
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• Agility of the pricing table was high (seems to be subject of biweekly rolling updates)
• The HCP comes at different flavors concerning the available services that a delivered via bundles
 Choose wisely
• Do not forget to order the HANA instance if you need one, it is not included in the HANA Cloud Platform
… and do not expect that HCP and HANA are available at the same point in time
• Attention: No real “Cloud”-characteristics for SAP HANA (scaling etc.)
 Choose wisely
• Services that might be part of the selected package now (but were not then) have to be ordered separately
e. g. HCP Predictive Services

9. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 2: Administration – HCP
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• HCP (without HANA)
 Rolling Updates
 No Downtime
 Larger changes can happen
 True, works as expected
• No real administrations tasks necessary
• How to get informed for the updates?
Subscribe to a mailing list (No automatic subscription) and/or to SCN area
• The stability of the offered services is okay.
 The Java runtime seems to be the most instable component (not of relevance for our project)
 HCP itself also sometimes not reachable (rarely)

10. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 2: Administration – SAP HANA
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11. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 2: Administration – SAP HANA
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• SAP HANA (in HCP) was a drama at the beginning (duration approx. 2 months)
 Examples:
• 50 crashes in the first week
• 100% CPU time of HANA for a few days (we did not do anything on SAP HANA)
• “The file that could not be deleted”
 You have to do the admin tasks, but have only limited access (Neo and HANA Studio)
 Support has potential for improvement
 Release cycle of patches is not clear (got better)
 SAP HANA patching means downtime
 Good News: Stabilization since SP10

12. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 3: Development - Tooling
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• Web-based Tooling was used mostly (as recommended by SAP)
• Web IDE for UI5 Development
 No complains
• Web-based Development Workbench for HANA XS Development
 Job could be done, but not as “stable” as expected 
 Fallback on Eclipse when the web-based tooling failed (sometimes necessary)

13. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 3: Development – Tooling
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If you discover an error, open an OSS …

14. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 3: Development – HANA XSC + PAL + Text Analytics
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• HANA XSC Development
 As expected
 No surprises
• Text Analytics
 Powerful toolbox
 Not very comfortable to “debug”
 No tooling support (Dictionaries, CGUL rules)
• PAL (Predictive Analysis Library)
 Surprisingly buggy (e. g. k-means did not work in SP10)
 Documentation is incomplete (parameters are not documented, but used in examples)
 Unhandy to integrate into an XSC application (real persistence is needed at several spots)
 Difficult to identify the root cause of an error

15. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Step 3: Development – UI5
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• UI5 Development in HCP
 Quite smooth (however some issues had to be faced)
• BUT: What if you want to bring together a UI5 App with the RESTful HANA XSC services?
 Propagation of User authentication is needed (Principal propagation or App2App SSO)
• At the point of development there was no documentation on that topic 
• Several months after opening an OSS this issue was solved
• Meanwhile a blog post on the topic exists:
http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/cloud-platform/blog/2016/03/21/principal-propagation-
between-html5-and-sap-hana-xs-on-sap-hana-cloud-platform

16. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Looking Back
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• HCP is getting more and more “professional”
e. g. administration, usability of the cockpit, consistency
• Cloud characteristics (compared e. g. to Azure) leave room for improvement
• Pricing is definitely an obstacle
• Exclusive hosting by SAP is a limiting factor for customers
(Will it get better with the “new” HCP?)
• UI5 development is a very positive feature
But: Build chain support is missing

17. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Looking Back
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• SAP HANA instance in HCP is not a pure pleasure
 Surprisingly unstable in several areas (has improved over the last SPs)
 Overall support was not good
 Features of SAP HANA are sometimes not easy to integrate
 Integration into HCP is somewhat “bumpy”
• Organizational topics
 Dedicated skill set is needed
 Transferring an ABAP developer to this “world” and expecting him to be as productive as before will not
work

18. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
Looking Forward
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• Availability and Stability of XSA in HCP?
• Migration from XSC to XSA?
• “New” HCP with Cloud Foundry: Consequences for the applications?

19. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform – A Travel Report
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Thanks for your Attention

20. .consulting .solutions .partnership
msg systems ag (Headquarters)
Robert-Buerkle-Str. 1, 85737 Ismaning/Munich
Germany
www.msg-systems.com
Dr. Christian Lechner
Principal IT Consultant
Christian.Lechner@msg-systems.com
https://twitter.com/lechnerc77
https://people.sap.com/christian.lechner