SAP Hybris commerce

SAP Hybris is now the umbrella name for a number of software solutions, and we don't intend to discuss them all here; our focus is on the SAP Hybris Commerce Platform, which is a leading e-commerce solution. After the acquisition of Hybris in 2013, SAP decided to discontinue their own WebChannel platform and focus on the Hybris Commerce Suite, which is currently known as SAP Commerce. It is an omnichannel sales platform that provides a consistent user experience across every sales channel.

SAP Commerce is not based on the SAP NetWeaver stack, and not written in ABAP. The execution environment for the SAP Hybris Platform is a Java EE Servlet Container. The platform and all extensions to it run within the Spring environment, which allows easy wiring and configuration of each component. It provides generic logic such as security, caching, clustering, and persistence.⁴⁰

SAP Commerce is available in two editions:

• SAP Commerce: This is on-premises; running on customer infrastructure or in Public Cloud.
• SAP Commerce Cloud: This is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering available from SAP deployed on Microsoft Azure.

The on-premises edition deployment and overall architecture is driven by the implementation partner based on your specific needs. The software can be deployed on VMs, but since release 1811 partners can also deploy the solution on AKS, which is currently the recommended approach. As the SAP Commerce architecture is open, partners choose frameworks and components that complement the solution.

When it comes to the database management system, SAP Hybris actively supports Oracle, MySQL, Percona XtraDB Cluster, SAP HANA DB, or Microsoft SQL Server⁴¹.

But partners can also influence the deployment model and decide to run the database on VMs, or choose to use native cloud databases such as Azure SQL Database. Similarly, SAP does not provide a strict specification for the reverse proxy engine, which can use Apache server or the Azure Application Gateway:

Figure 2-46: SAP Commerce Architecture (Source: sap.com)

The main SAP Commerce components comprise:

• Reverse proxy: A web server to route incoming traffic. It can be deployed on virtual machines or on Azure Kubernetes Service. It should reside in a DMZ network where the traffic is filtered using firewalls. A Web Application Firewall (WAF), which is part of Azure Application Gateway, provides an additional layer of security.
• SAP Commerce:
  • Front-end: Internet-facing storefront.
  • SAP Commerce Backoffice: Backend application to manage the SAP Commerce store. Customers do not require access to this application and the traffic can be limited to internal, trusted networks only.
• Apache Solr: Provides a search engine and indexing capabilities to optimize solution performance
• Database: Stores business data
• Back-end systems: ERP systems running in the customer landscape

Figure 2-47 illustrates the distribution of each component in the landscape. The reverse proxy is an entry point for connection from the internet. The main system components are protected by a firewall that filters the traffic:

Figure 2-47: SAP commerce components

During the provisioning, by default, SAP Commerce builds a broadcast or a multicast cluster. However, broadcast and multicast network traffic are not allowed on Microsoft Azure and therefore additional configuration is required to change the cluster type to unicast. As a result of this, each application server needs to be manually registered in the database.

The basic implementation of the SAP Commerce solution can be customized and run exclusively on Azure platform services – there is no need to provision VMs. The AKS simplifies the application scaling and reliability. Security of the platform is ensured by using the Azure Application Gateway. Azure Storage hosts images and other objects that are not suitable to keep in the database, and the network latency can be optimized by using Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN). Instead of installing a database platform on VMs, partners will very often decide to choose the fully managed Azure SQL Database that offers up to 99.995% SLA when using geo-replication.

Figure 2-48: A high-level architecture of SAP Commerce on AKS

Many customers license SAP Commerce based on the number of cores used by the software. In such scenarios, the SAP Commerce workload is isolated on a separate set of VMs to save on the licensing cost. Hyper-threading is not supported by the licensing model and therefore customers choose the Dv2-series VMs. Running SAP Commerce on VMs that support hyper-threading like E-series, which is a common choice for SAP NetWeaver workloads, would increase the license cost. Therefore, we recommend that you consider the below D-series VMs for the SAP Commerce workload:

Size	vCPU	Memory	Max data disk	Max uncached disk throughput: IOPS / Mbps	Max NICs / Expected network bandwidth (Mbps)
Standard_DS1_v2	1	3.5	4	3200 / 48	2 / 750
Standard_DS2_v2	2	7	8	6400 / 96	2 / 1500
Standard_DS3_v2	4	14	16	12800 / 192	4 / 3000
Standard_DS4_v2	8	28	32	25600 / 384	8 / 6000
Standard_DS5_v2	16	56	64	51200 / 768	8 / 12000

Table 2-11: SAP Commerce recommended VMs when licensed per core

Azure Monitor Application Insights for Java offers a fully managed, native monitoring capability for Java applications, and it can be used together to monitor SAP Commerce:

Figure 2-49: Azure Monitor Application Insights for Java (Source: microsoft.com)

You can track performance metrics or access application logs using a common platform – everything you need to monitor the availability, performance, reliability, and usage of your web applications on Azure.