SAP HANA Cloud: Operator's Guide

The new Operator's Guide is available in the official documentation. The guide targets operators that usually:

• don't have access to the application source
• have to update to the latest version
• maintain the stability and performance of the application

The new Operator's Guide has the following sections at present:

Console Client Reference

Contains information about the use of the console client and will gather all console commands that the SAP HANA Cloud SDK provides.

The new thing here is that finally we managed to provide a common convention of the exit codes that can be used when using the commands for scripting some operations.

Although the commands can still have their own exit codes they are now inside predefined ranges. This means that you may chose to care for a specific exit code, but generally you can just rely on the range for most of the operations.

For example handling exit codes range 40 to 109 guarantees you that you've covered all parameter validation errors. The operation may fail because the archive you are trying to deploy does not exist but you don't need to care about the exact exit code since you are sure it is in the range above.

Configuring Applications 
 

Documents different aspects on the application configuration that can help the operators achieve improved stability and performance. The covered topics include (for now) how to:

• update your runtime version
• enable GZip response compression
• configure JVM arguments
• use Java 6 or Java 7
• scale horizontally your application
• assign roles
• configure destinations

The section describes most of the parameters present in the deploy command and gives recommendations and explanation of all the features. Of course it contains security and connectivity information as well (the last topics).

We'll take care to expand it with everything you can configure so keep an eye for more information. 

Updating Applications

This section contains information about features needed to ensure the update of your application is as smooth as possible:

• Update with Zero Downtime
• Update with downtime
• Soft shut-down 

I've already described most of the features in my previous blog but since we have more to share I intend on writing a follow up to complete the picture with the support for custom Maintenance Page.

As you can see we have laid the foundation for the new Operator's Guide, but it's by no means complete. You can just check the release notes or have a look at the content every two weeks for new topics.