As part of the DevTalks Series for SAP HANA Cloud this blog will concentrate on the Connectivity Service of SAP HANA Cloud. The expert in the SAP HANA Cloud team is Timo Lakner, the Area Product Owner for the Connectivity Service.
In my interview with Timo he explained how the Connectivity Service works. Timo explains the Cloud Connector as well as the destinations functionality one can use as part of the Connectitiy Service.
Most importantly he also explains the security aspects of this service as the by its' nature the Cloud Connector enables you to connect your on-premise systems that run behind a firewall with a SAP HANA Cloud application that can be accessed via the internet. In a nutshell the Cloud Connector establishes a SSL VPN tunnel between your on-premise world and your SAP HANA Cloud application. The Cloud Connector is installed in your on-premise environment and will expose only those resources or URL paths of your on-premise systems that you want to be exposed.
If you want to learn more details about this aspect read Timo's whitepaper on SCN explaining the security concept of the Connectivity Service of SAP HANA Cloud.
Another functionality of the Connectivity Service are the so called "destinations" as part of the SAP HANA Cloud API running on the application VM of your SAP HANA Cloud account. A destination is basically a symbolic name you configure on your SAP HANA Cloud server to a resource in the internet that you can look-up at runtime in the code of your application. So instead of hard-wiring things like the link and maybe credentials to access the resource in the internet you configure them once in your SAP HANA Cloud server and use the destinations' symbolic name in your code instead.
For more information you can use the SAP HANA Cloud help page for the Connectivity Service. Should you have more questions please feel free to reach-out to Timo or myself. Either via Twitter or via a direct message here on SCN.
For those of you who don't know how to start with SAP HANA Cloud, yet: visit the developer center for SAP HANA Cloud and get started quickly.
Have fun and happy coding,
Rui