SAP Hybris as a Service? Gain new opportunities thanks to YaaS

In 2015 SAP introduced Hybris as a Service. What do this new platform changes in the landscape of SAP Services? What are the benefits companies can gain in using this environment?

What is YaaS?

YaaS has been introduced as a platform for Microservices. It is the set of small, isolated applications, each handling a single task.

Do you remember how App-Store on your iPhone works? SAP Hybris YaaS Marketplace can be subscribed in a similar way. As a result, the user gets an access to create On-The-Fly solutions. These are mostly focused on e-commerce systems, like on-line stores. It allows business users to present and sell their products worldwide.

But YaaS is much more than just a marketplace. For example, users who want to add a custom feature to their E-commerce solution, which potentially could be implemented by themselves, get a workbench called “Builder” to deploy own Microservices and to integrate them into their projects. The platform supports developers with useful tools, detailed documentations and the interface itself, which is also designed for working in teams.

Rapid Application Development

Important factors of the functionality of the E-commerce solutions are services like Shopping Cart, Order Management or Product Contents. Alongside with other packages, these are called “Commerce as a Service”.

What does it mean in practice? There is no need for taking a decision on a big unhandy chunk of software. It is possible because now everyone decides for himself what functions should be integrated only by subscribing to the needed service packages. Adding further functionalities takes only a few clicks on the Marketplace.

Important information: YaaS is based on the Pay-per-Use model. That means that every user pays what they consume. Payment is just necessary as soon as the usage of a certain service reaches a pre-defined limit, for example, the number of transactions in Order Management.

Services can provide an interface called Builder Module. What is the practical use of it? For example, users can create new products for their shops and manage settings of respective services. This module is available via YaaS Builder and by this offers a space for setting control quite similar to a webpage construction kit.

YaaS supports the freedom of developers to choose the technologies they want to use. Communication between services in YaaS is implemented by REST APIs as a simple and consistent concept. This enables developers to choose out the variety of programming languages for their implementations. The only relevant thing is the services exposing Application Programming Interface (API). Because on the one hand REST is a very common standard for web-applications and hence already very well known by many programmers and on the other hand various overviews, manuals and Tutorials are available, as well as detailed documentations regarding services from the marketplace, developers find their path working with YaaS very quickly and can start developing own solutions early.

Furthermore, YaaS provides Software Development Kits as tools for rapid development of services, Builder modules and documentations. For example, the Service SDK offers functionalities to generate Java-source code by the command that already enables functionalities of a service-interface.

Managing images with SAP Media Service

The package “Media” by SAP contains a microservice for uploading and managing media like images, videos etc. Via its REST API operations can be called for first of all creating space for a new file and then returning a link to upload e.g. an image-file. Uploaded content can also be deleted or displayed by the known REST operations. To get familiar with working with such APIs, we have developed a corresponding service that communicates and exchanges data with the interface of Media service.

Communication between YaaS components, our own service “Apofront” and Media service.

A “Client” can be created and configured in the Builder and is important for authorization in YaaS. It is important because without this any (including unwanted) access to the service would be possible.

In this case, the price for using the Media service is calculated by storage usage. One Gigabyte is free, any additional 1 GB costs 0,46€ per month (German marketplace (8/7/2017).

YaaS and E-commerce: Food Commerce Suite (Use Case)

YaaS services are already implemented in the market. For example, the company SaaS AG developed the Food Commerce Suite Lieferladen.de, an online shop for food that consists of CaaS-components and own creations and therefore encompasses all aspects of E-commerce and logistics. The Front-end is based on the freely expandable YaaS Storefront. The Builder modules enable the shop’s management to e.g. adjust settings and to add new products. The Food Commerce Suite is a perfect example of how YaaS can be realized in the case of E-commerce.

How can you benefit from using YaaS services?

With the evolving Digital Transformation, the expectations and imaginations of software are increasingly changing from an architecture of monolithic solutions to an architecture of many small, isolated and modular applications, each fulfilling a single task, but forming a complete solution in the end.

Microservice architecture means flexibility and fast expandability, without need perform changes in the whole system.

YaaS allows companies to quickly pick needed functionalities and expand their systems rapidly with customized modules that are flexible and easy to adapt. YaaS provides the freedom to use any programming language and the tools that make development easier and less time consuming to accelerate the progress of your project.

Furthermore, rich tutorials and documentations provide the possibility to get familiar with all concepts quickly. YaaS fits remarkably well for web-development but works perfectly when aiming for E-commerce solutions being realized in a very short period of time.

Article was written by Maximilian Zierke, Business Software Developer in Apollogic.