SAP API Management FAQ

[ElijahM]

SAP API Management is a new and diverse product in the SAP product portfolio, and is part of SAPs initiative to become a more open and agile company, in moving towards an API-First methodology. It is intended to complement the SAP API Business Hub in terms of providing secure managed governance to API consumption. Due to this radical change in operation many questions come up around APIs and API management. This blog is intended to provide updated answers to common ones.

General

1. What is an API?

APIs are Application Programming Interfaces. It is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications. APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can talk to another. APIs are especially important because, they dictate how developers can create new apps that tap into big web services and social network. APIs facilitate interaction by selectively exposing certain functionalities, allowing different applications/websites/devices to communicate effectively with each other.

2. What is SAP API Management?

API Management is the process of publishing, promoting and overseeing APIs is a secure and scalable manner. SAP API Management provides secure governance over APIs based on open standards like SOAP, REST, OData, with enterprise grade security. This simplifies the way developers go about integrating with their SAP and non-SAP application, reducing cost, foster innovation and participate in the larger API economy.

3. What is the value customers should expect from SAP API Management?

SAP API Management enables provisioning, governance, security and scalability of enterprise information for digital access. It provides for one experience for managing and monitoring APIs across various data platforms (SAP and non-SAP) with real-time analytics and reporting on usage metrics.

4. How is SAP making SAP API Management available to customers?

SAP Cloud Platform, API Management is a Software as a Service On-Demand offering managed on the SAP Cloud Platform. 

 

5. What is the value customers should expect from SAP API Management in the Cloud?

With robust services for integration, identity management, mobile and collaboration, SAP Cloud Platform makes all the complicated stuff simple, so you can quickly modernize your business applications. SAP API Management can integrate seamlessly with all these services to enable enterprises to selectively externalize their assets in a device-agnostic manner, not just via the traditional browser-centric model, but also over mobile devices and any other channel required which can communicate via standard HTTP. This flexibility allows for provided services to be consumed on any platform. The cloud allows this to be done securely, and with the scalability to meet demand as needed at low investment cost, amortized over a subscription model. SAP API Management provides enhanced collaboration and co-innovation with business partners / consumers / developers by rapid onboarding and easy data visibility. By allowing customers, partners, suppliers and all users of enterprise services to directly access relevant information, enterprises drive increased revenue since information flows on-demand, in real-time. Developer portal reduces internal developments costs, and frees up developer teams to tackle other projects.

6. What is the value customers should expect from SAP API Management Hybrid model?

As the name implies, the Hybrid deployment provides the best of both OnPremises and OnDemand. Customers deploy a local instance of SAP API Management to gain the benefit of having governance sitting within the corporate network, closer to the source data, for high-security, low-latency application needs. Additionally they also get access to SAP Cloud Platform services for rapid innovation of new applications for B2C, B2B, B2E, etc. scenarios that require external access, and can scale rapidly to meet changing demands.

7. What is the pricing model for SAP API Management? 

SAP has attempted to simplify the pricing model as much as possible:

1. Ondemand Consumption - This is a "buffet" model for subscribing to SAP Cloud Platform, which gives customers the ability to turn on / off any service at any time. Consumption of API calls through SAP Cloud Platform, API Management will be charged against customer account.


2. OnDemand Subscription - SAP Cloud Platform, API Management is priced solely on expected customer call volume. This can be purchased in 2 ways
   
   
   
   1. A la carte - in blocks of 1 million API calls per month, up to the amount desired (~Billions of API calls)
   
   
   2. Bundled with other SAP Cloud Platform Services, e.g. Integration Bundle, Application Bundle. A set amount of calls per month are included in the package. Additional calls can be purchased with the a la carte method, and added to customers allowance.
   
   
   
   

Additional information can be found here: https://cloudplatform.sap.com/pricing.html

8. How is SAP API Management placed in the SAP portfolio?

SAP has many API providers such as SAP Gateway, SAP HANA Platform, S/4HANA, SAP Leonardo, SuccessFactors and many more in the road map. SAP Is centralizing the available APIs it is making available in the SAP API Business Hub, which can be seen as the SAP version of the Developer Portal and is being integrated with SAP API Management. SAP API Management services to be the centralized location for customers to manage and engage with the numerous SAP and non-SAP APIs, which helps unlock the value of digital assets, enabling in creating and delivering content and business services to consumers, partners and developers

9. How scalable is SAP API Management?

SAP API Management enables provisioning, governance, scalability and security of enterprise information for digital assets. Customers can also scale up to billions of API calls.

10.  Is SAP API Management solution multi-tenant?

Yes, it is fully multi-tenant solution.

11.  Where are the data centers located for SAP Cloud Platform, API Management service?

SAP API Management solution runs from multiple SAP data centers, Germany, US (West/East), Australia, China and Japan.

Additional Data Centers are being brought online, in addition to a multi-cloud strategy with the Cloud Foundry environment, in order to check for the latest availability SAP has provided a Data Center Availability page, which you can filter by API Management.

12. What is the difference between SAP API Management and the SAP API Business Hub?

The SAP API Business Hub is SAPs free to use catalog of pre-packaged APIs and Integration flows from across the entire SAP Portfolio as well as from SAP Partners. Here you can discover, test and consume APIs, even before you buy a product.
SAP Cloud Platform, API Management has integrated the SAP API Business Hub within it to allow you to directly copy APIs and begin to work with them in the tool.

13. Where can I learn more on SAP API Management?

There are a number of great resources that have been made available to help get started with SAP API Management:

• Official Help Documentation
  
  
  
  • help.sap.com OnDemand Documentation
  
  
  
  


• SAP Product Overview - API Management


• SAP Community
  
  
  
  • Overview and Getting Started Blog Collection
  
  
  • Community Questions & Answers
  
  
  • Developer Tutorials for SAP Cloud Platform
  
  
  
  


• SAP Cloud Platform Capabilities Overview and Contact


• Social media channels:
  
  
  
  • YouTube: http://spr.ly/youtube-sap-api-management
  
  
  • YouTube Getting Started: Click Here
  
  
  • SAP Developers: https://www.facebook.com/sapdevelopers
  
  
  • Twitter:
    
    
    
    • SAP Cloud Platform
    
    
    • SAP Digital Business Services
    
    
    • SAP Developers
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sap-developers
  
  
  
  

For legacy customers please find documentation here: help.sap.com OnPremises Documentation

Please, feel free to reach out to us in the comments to this blog post in case you have further questions or comments!

[former_member392441]

Hi Martinez,

Is it possible to add external libraries(JARs) to our API Proxy in SAP API mangagement??

In APIGEE it is possible, Please let me know is that possible in SAP API Management

[ElijahM]

Hi Rajesh,

For SAP API Management by Apigee - the OEM whitelabel OnPrem version of SAP API Management, this is possible in the same way as in Apigee, via the JAVA Policy.

For SAP Cloud Platform, API Management we have disabled the JAVA Policy for security reasons, as the requirements for vetting arbitrary code in a multitenant environment made this something of an overt risk. However SAP Cloud Platform provides the capability to run JAVA directly on the Cloud Platform, which can then be triggered by a Service Callout from the API proxy, providing ostensibly the same functionality.

I hope this helps with your question.

Regards,
Elijah

[former_member392441]

Hi Martinez,

Thank you, So this mean where I have to deploy the JARs (libraries) in the cloud Platform ?

[former_member392441]

Hi Martinez,

Thank you, So this mean where I have to deploy the JARs (libraries) in the cloud Platform ?

 

[former_member443975]

Hi Martinez,

I set up a development portal site which include "API-Products", "API Subscriptions" and "Create API App". Now I can see all the created APIs and my subscriptions in API Management. Other users can also see the same data if they have assigned some roles . Is it possible that users can only see their own subscription?  Please let me know if I miss something. Thanks!

Regards,

Sandy

[ElijahM]

Hi Sandy,

Please can you create this question in https://answers.sap.com ? This way your question can be seen by others, and will help to keep the same question from coming up again and again.

Regards,
Elijah

[nthomas82]

Hi Elijah,

I would like to understand the role of SAP PI in the landscape. Currently we use PI to expose our SOAP services to customers & vendors(outside our network). Our internal applications consume the services directly from ECC(not via PI).

1. Will the architecture pattern for REST apis from SAP that requires transformation/mediation be : ECC–>SAP gateway–>SAP PI–>API Manager?
2. For SOAP Services that require transformation/mediation, will the pattern be:                              ECC–>SAP PI–>API Manager
3. For consumption by internal applications, should SOAP services be directly exposed from ECC on API manager or should the SOAP services be exposed on PI first & then on API manager?

Thanks

Nobin

[ElijahM]

Hi Nobin,

 

Thank you for your inquiry, apologies for delay in reply.

Architecture patterns are flexible and dependent on use case. Typically we suggest that customers who are heavily invested in PI continue to leverage the work they have put into their landscape with the new API paradigm, so as not to spend time rebuilding things which have already been built. But do be mindful about what new services you develop, and what approach to take when doing work from scratch and what tools to use.

With that said, speaking very broadly the use case will determine the architecture. SOAP and REST/ODATA can both be consumed directly by SAP API Management. What you will want to think about is how much effort do you want to spend in which layer.
Simple transformation/mediation can be done directly in SAP API Management, which provides flexibility in modifying or replicating, or in the case of needing more complex transformation it can be done in SAP PI first.

The 3 scenarios:

ECC -> SAP Gateway -> SAP PI -> SAP API Management

ECC -> SAP PI -> SAP API Management

ECC -> (SAP Gateway) -> SAP API Management

Are all quite common use cases by customers.

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have further questions about the "When to use what" question!

Regards,
Elijah

[nthomas82]

Hi Elijah,

 

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I have a followup question on synchronous & asynchronous services. Will API management be used for all synchronous scenarios & PI for all asynchronous scenarios? Is there a clear distinction like that on the use cases?

Thanks

Nobin

[ElijahM]

Hi Nobin,

Yes, typically APIs will be used in a synchronous request/response pattern, however this is not always the case.
In the case of an async request, we have seen that we can use APIM to return an ACK to sender, and then hand over the request to a middleware service like PI, or a MQ to handle processing the remainder of the processing. This pattern would be used if you want to have a universal abstraction layer on top of all underlying services and backends, rather than having users have to pick and choose when to use what.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Elijah

[nthomas82]

Thanks Elijah! This really helps!

[former_member610899]

Hi Elijah,

 

Thanks for the blog, its really good. I have a requirement to build a rest API using XML structure(Payload) is it possible, if yes how can we achieve it in APIM?

Thanks for helping out.

 

[ElijahM]

Hi Vaishali,

Are you looking to build the API directly in APIM? SAP API Management is in general designed for the Governance of APIs and not their building, however you could use the API Designer to develop an OpenAPI spec API and then generate a Microservice Server Stub to deploy into the PaaS layer. Here is a blog describing this process

https://blogs.sap.com/2017/12/13/sap-api-management-api-implementation-and-management-on-cloud-found...

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Elijah

[junnes_ashley_pineda72]

Hi, Is it possible to directly migrate an API proxy from Apigee to SAP APIM? Appreciate your inputs.

[ElijahM]

Hi Junnes,

In general we recommend that you create a new question on the community for easier tracking and discoverability by other users.

But to answer your question - yes an Apigee API Proxy can be imported into SAP API Management, with a few caveats. SAP APIM does not support JAVA Callout, Flow Callout, and a couple other items, so those functionalities will need to be reworked when importing.

 

Regards,
Elijah

[junnes_ashley_pineda72]

Hi Elijah, Thanks for your reply. Do you have a documentation on Apigee and SAP APIM in terms of the policies that are not in SAP APIM

**SAP APIM does not support JAVA Callout, Flow Callout, and a couple other items, so those functionalities will need to be reworked when importing.

[ElijahM]

Hi Junnes,

Unfortunately we do not specifically call out comparisons between our products and others, even Apigee. We do nicely catalog the capabilities of SAP API management https://help.sap.com/viewer/66d066d903c2473f81ec33acfe2ccdb4/Cloud/en-US/74c042b9710e4970ae51ec58b74...

Please check there if there are any capabilities that you are looking for which are missing.

Regards,
Elijah

[former_member5380]

Hi elijah.martinez

Great blog, thanks!

I have some doubts, for example, could we expose a SOAP webservice from SAP CRM (on premise) in SAP API Management?

On the other hand, I'm not sure about the mapping/transformation capabilities of SAP APIM.
For security reasons, we need to make an intermediate call to validate a SAP CDC JWT token, no problem here. The thing is that we also need to extract a value from the token (the CDC uid) and map it to a field in the SOAP webservice. Would this be possible?

Thanks and kind regards,
Judit

[ElijahM]

Hi Judit,

Thank you for your feedback.

For your questions we request that you open a new question on https://answers.sap.com under the tag SAP API Management so that discussion can occur and be searchable for others to benefit as well.

In short the answer should be yes, that a call out and JWT token handling should be possible, but we may need to discuss more on what you mean in reference to mapping.

Regards,
Elijah