The path towards cloud-native applications is being adopted by more and more companies. For green-field applications this is a natural choice to architect your applications in a way so that they can be developed, deployed and operated in a cloud environment. This of course could mean on-prem, hybrid or public cloud.

When thinking about your heritage applications and your desire to modernize those, a cloud migration isn’t typically an easy thing to do. Not primarily because of technical reasons, but typically because they exist for a reason and in many cases these applications are mission-critical. Once you made a transformation decision and you created a business case, the next step is to come up with a suitable roadmap for the application. In a previous post, I described the major approaches of such a transformation. In my opinion there is only one suitable way if you truly want to leverage cloud-native concepts and make use of benefits from a cloud deployment … and that is a re-architecture.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, I finally managed to deploy and run a custom application in SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP).

The difficult part for me was not setting up the environment per se, but to solve all the source dependencies and unknowns around the platform’s prerequisites. I found it really challenging to actually find the relevant information on the web, so I decided to write this post to list a set of issues I ran into and how I managed to solve them. Some of the items might not be surprising and for some these will be self-evident, but at least for me these were Aha! moments. I have to add that I am not a real Java expert (I am much more familiar with the Microsoft development ecosystem), so please ignore my ignorance around this technology stack.

I am very excited that I managed to deploy and execute my first application on SAP HANA Cloud Platform (https://hcp.sap.com/ (original URL https://hcp.sap.com/)) today. It uses the native in-memory database and application services.

The base application source code was generated using Ciber Momentum Engineer (https://momentum.ciber.com/) and then customized to fit their platform-as-a-service environment.

I have to admit that this was not quite straight forward and I had to go through a significant amount of trial & error before I finally managed to deploy the application itself without any issues and exceptions being thrown. It also took quite a while until the database automatically got populated with all the business entities or rather tables. There are quite a lot of dependencies and restrictions that you have to know and be aware of; i.e. things like