SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model (XS advanced for short) provides a comprehensive platform for the development and execution of micro-service oriented applications, taking advantage of SAP HANA's in-memory architecture and parallel execution capabilities.
About SAP HANA XS Advanced
SAP HANA XS advanced offers a rich set of embedded services that enable end-to-end support for web-based applications including lightweight web servers, persistency services, and a configurable identity provider. Furthermore, the platform supports polyglot application development with a core set of pre-deployed runtimes that are accepted as industry standards, for example, node.js or JavaEE.
Although the built-in runtimes come with first-class development and monitoring support, the platform has an open architecture that allows you to add custom runtimes. This high flexibility makes it essential that you put a strong focus on security concepts, not only when configuring and setting up the infrastructure, but also throughout operating the system.
Architecture Overview
The basic system architecture has a classic 3-tier approach, we can see in below diagram
There is a distinction between the overall SAP HANA system and the SAP HANA XS advanced application server. The SAP HANA system refers to the entire SAP HANA platform as part of the integrated solution. All services of the SAP HANA system share the same system identifiers (that is, instance number and SID) and are controlled by the hdbdaemon service.
The third tier, represented by an SAP HANA database, provides persistency services, that is, data storage. In contrast, the application server components in the middle tier are responsible for deploying, running, and monitoring the applications. Most security-related features such as authentication, authorization, and auditing are primarily enforced in this layer. End users interact on the client layer with system or business users that are authenticated by an identity provider (IdP), which is SAP HANA user management by default. However, both the server components and the applications themselves access the SAP HANA database only through technical database users that the platform generates implicitly. Direct access to the database is only intended for database administration and monitoring purposes.
The following diagram provides a more detailed overview of the technical system landscape of the XS advanced application server. All relevant components and storages used by the application server layer are highlighted with a gray background.
The XS advanced application server relies on the following SAP HANA services contributing to the integrated platform solution:
- xscontroller (Controller, FileSystem Broker, Platform Router)
- xsexecagent (Execution Agent)
- xsuaaserver (UAA, UAA Broker and SAP HANA Service Broker)