Lesson 2 of 5
Style and platform choice
10 min
Listen to this lesson
Choosing an integration style is choosing a set of trade-offs: who waits for whom, how tightly systems depend on each other, what happens when one is down, and how many consumers can join later. Choosing a platform is choosing where those trade-offs are implemented and operated. Make the style decision first; the platform follows.
| Style | Good for | Watch out for | Contoso example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Synchronous API (OData, REST, SOAP) | A caller needs an answer now: availability, price, status | Temporal coupling; caller fails when provider is down | Dealer portal checks alternator availability |
| Asynchronous messaging (IDoc, queued messages) | Reliable document exchange; provider can be offline | Ordering, duplicates, reprocessing | Sales orders from Great Lakes Fleet Services |
| Events (publish/subscribe) | Many consumers react to a change; loose coupling | Event design, schema versions, replay, "thin" events needing callbacks | Business partner changed, consumed by three systems |
| Bulk data (replication, files, extraction) | High volume, analytics, migration | Latency, reconciliation, data quality | Finance data to the analytics platform nightly |
| User/UI integration | People working across apps | Security and session handling | Field technician app on SAP S/4HANA APIs |
A decision path
- Does the caller need a result to continue?Yes → synchronous API, with timeouts and a fallback · No → continue
- Do several consumers need to know about the same change?Yes → event, with a catalog entry and schema · No → continue
- Is it a business document between two parties that must arrive exactly once?Yes → asynchronous messaging with idempotent processing · No → continue
- Is it high volume for analysis or migration?Yes → bulk data or replication · No → reconsider: maybe no integration is needed
Events deserve a word of caution. SAP's Architecture Center describes event-driven architecture as a model where an event in one application automatically sends a message to every application that needs it, through one or more event brokers, supporting scalability and loose coupling. That loose coupling is exactly what makes events harder to test and govern: the publisher does not know its consumers. Use events where fan-out and decoupling pay for that cost, not as a fashionable replacement for every API.
Platform options in SAP's portfolio
SAP Integration Suite is SAP's integration platform as a service. SAP's material lists its capabilities, including Cloud Integration for process integration flows, API Management for exposing and governing APIs, Event Mesh for business events (the capability that succeeds the standalone SAP Event Mesh service), Integration Advisor and Trading Partner Management for B2B, Open Connectors for third-party SaaS, Integration Assessment for strategy, and Migration Assessment for moving from SAP Process Orchestration. For larger event landscapes, SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh provides a distributed, multi-broker mesh; the Architecture Center positions the Event Mesh capability for starter or smaller-volume scenarios and advanced event mesh for enterprise-wide eventing.
Edge Integration Cell is the hybrid option: an integration runtime that the customer deploys and operates on Kubernetes in its own private landscape, while design and monitoring stay in the cloud tenant. SAP lists the reasons: process data locally for compliance and governance, run flows modeled in Cloud Integration, manage APIs with policies, route business events, and give SAP Process Orchestration customers a migration path. The trade-off is that the customer runs the operations (installation, updates, Kubernetes).
Exceptions to the platform
Some integrations legitimately bypass the central platform: SAP-to-SAP integrations delivered and supported by SAP as part of a product, direct database replication for analytics, or a file exchange with a bank mandated by the bank. The strategy should name these categories so that exceptions are recognized rather than argued each time, and every exception still goes into the catalog.
What would you do?
Plant 1710's end-of-line test benches send results for every alternator to S/4HANA. The plant cannot stop when the internet link fails, and quality data must stay on-premises for a customer contract. Which platform choice fits best?
- Choose the style first (API, messaging, events, bulk, UI), then the platform.
- Events give loose coupling and fan-out but are harder to govern and test; use them where that pays.
- SAP Integration Suite covers process, API, event, B2B and assessment capabilities; advanced event mesh scales eventing.
- Edge Integration Cell runs flows in a customer-managed Kubernetes landscape with cloud design and monitoring.
Check your understanding · not graded
Lesson check
1. When is a synchronous API the right style?
2. What is a key operational trade-off of Edge Integration Cell?
3. According to SAP's Architecture Center, what is the Event Mesh capability positioned for?
4. Why name categories of platform exceptions in the strategy?