The short answer
Use SAP advanced event mesh when a business fact, such as a sales order being changed, matters to more than one system and the publisher should not need to know who those systems are. Keep APIs for questions that need an immediate answer. Keep integration flows for transformation, orchestration and protocol mediation. Most real designs combine all three.
This guide helps a CIO, an integration architect and the head of an SAP centre of excellence decide whether event-driven integration is worth adding, where it sits next to what you already run, and how to start with one controlled use case instead of a platform programme.
What advanced event mesh is
SAP Integration Suite is SAP's strategic integration platform on SAP BTP. Its capabilities include Cloud Integration for integration flows, API Management, Integration Advisor and Trading Partner Management for B2B, Integration Assessment, Migration Assessment, a migration tool in Cloud Integration, Open Connectors, and event-driven integration with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh.
Advanced event mesh is a fully managed event broker service. The facts that matter for design are these:
- It is a fully managed event broker service that connects brokers across hybrid and multi-cloud landscapes as one event mesh.
- Routing is topic based. Publishers send to a topic and subscribers choose the topics they need.
- Its event portal helps you design and catalogue events.
SAP S/4HANA can publish business events. SAP Business Accelerator Hub publishes SAP APIs, events and prebuilt integration packages, so it is a sensible first place to look for events SAP has already defined.
It helps to be clear about what the service is not. It is not a substitute for API Management, it is not a mapping tool, and it does not settle who owns the data. It moves facts between systems. It does not decide what those facts mean.
When to use it
Treat the choice as a set of decision points, not a technology preference.
Choose events when
- Several consumers react to the same fact, today or in future, and adding a consumer should not mean changing the publisher.
- The consumer can act in its own time and does not need an answer in the same call.
- Batch processing delays decisions, and the underlying change can be published at the moment it happens.
- Systems sit in different clouds or regions, or use different protocols, and you want one routing fabric between them.
- You want a catalogue of business events that teams can discover and reuse.
