SAP HANA Cloud: Application properties. Multiple connections

The latest update of SAP HANA Cloud Platform (we've changed the name again) includes two small but important changes. Copied from the release notes:

• Deployment with multiple connections:

"You can use the --connections parameter in the deploy command  to specify the number of connections to be used during deployment. Use the parameter to speed up the deployment of application archives bigger than 5 MB in slow networks."

• Application properties listing

"You can now list the properties of a deployed application using the new command [...] display-application-properties."

Multiple connections

I already provided measurements on the impact of using more than one connection in slow or traffic/connection shaped networks in one of my previous blogs. You can now try this for yourself by using the --connections parameter during deployment.

For number of connections you can use:

• --connections 1 means you want to disable the feature
• maximum number of connections --connections 5

Although some networks allow higher number of connections than 5, this rarely pays off, unless you are the only person left in the office on Friday evening with the sole purpose to utilize the whole bandwidth of the company's leased internet line.

Splitting an archive in small chunks has performance penalty of 5-10% over simply transferring it via the line. We wanted to guarantee the split was really needed so we added the 5 MiB entry barrier for the new feature.

To determine the right number of network connections you can:

1. Start  with the default settings
2. Increase the number from 2 up to 5 looking at the times for deployment:
   [Thu Oct 31 10:22:53 FET 2013] Deployment started....
   [Thu Oct 31 10:22:58 FET 2013] Deployment finished successfully 
3. Use the number of connections that provided the fastest deploy time

Application properties listing

This new feature is small, but quite important. Without this neat feature the operators and developers had to write down what they actually used as deploy parameters. There was no way to obtain the settings from the cloud.

Now we finally provided a way to get this info and be able to blame either yourself or a colleague for using a certain setting:

C:\sdk-1.39.13.6\tools>neo display-application-properties samples\deploy_war\trial.properties

SAP HANA Cloud Console Client

Requesting application properties for:
   application: test
   account    : i024099trial
   SDK version: 1.39.13.6
   user       : i024099

Password for your user:

[Thu Oct 31 10:35:24 FET 2013] Requesting application properties...
[Thu Oct 31 10:35:25 FET 2013] Request for application properties finished successfully
   runtime-version   : 1
   minimum-processes : 1
   maximum-processes : 1
   java-version      : 6