Preface – This post is part of the SAP on Azure series.

Introduction

In SAP’s world, SAP Cloud Platform or SAP Business Technology Platform is a well-known term. After introduction of SAP MTA and SAP CAPm, it has gained a lot of attention. In this article we will try to explore it.

What is SAP Cloud Platform (SAP Business Technology Platform)

SAP Cloud Platform is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offered by SAP to develop cloud business applications. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) offers SAP Cloud Platform with additional services in the form of Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service. It can be accessed here.

You can create a trial account by just clicking the Sign in button at right top.

Let us discuss some important concepts related to SAP Cloud Platform:

Global Accounts

When you visit first time SAP Cloud Platform, then it is the first thing that you will create. A Global Account is mainly created for a team of projects or sometimes for a project. In this way you keep multiple teams or projects separate from each other on Cloud Platform.

Regions

While creating a Global Account, you might be asked to choose regions. A region here simply donate the location of the Hosting or database. If you stay in Germany, then you should the nearest location based region, as it improves the call speed and hence product quality.

Sub Accounts

Inside a Global Account, you need to create sub accounts. The sub accounts can be either SAP Neo or SAP Cloud Foundry. The WebIDE services are mostly linked to SAP Neo, hence it gets mandatory to have it. If you just want to plan deployment of UI5/Fiori with backend in the form of ABAP OData (on premise) or non-HANA based services, then you can simply go with Neo, else for MTA, CAPM, or SAP Leonardo, you will have to go for SAP Cloud Foundry based Sub Accounts.
Neo belongs to SAP while Cloud Foundry is based on either AWS, Azure, GCP or Alibaba Hosting.

Spaces

Within a sub account, you have an option to create multiple spaces. It is must to have one space. This is the place where all your code is deployed. A space is used to divide a single account for multiple use case, like one for Development, one for Testing and one for Production.

Services

At all level i.e. Global Account, Sub Account and Spaces, you will find option to add a service. A service in SAP Cloud Platform is like an extension where you can utilise multiple cloud services from SAP like Destination, AWS object store, malware scanner, Business objects, Blockchain services and much more.

Instances

When you choose a service, you need to create an instance that will be linked to your project. An instance basically means a preserved copy of service, just for our project or space linked with micro services running within space.

Destinations

Destination is a place where you can maintain third party API calls, or OData API or even SAP APIs. We can either create a Destination as an Instance (as discussed above) or directly within space.

Cloud Connectors

A cloud connector is an important link to connect an on-premise service to SAP Cloud Platform.

Security in SAP Cloud Platform

SAP Cloud Platform provides an option to access Apps and services based upon roles. For this use case, Users, Roles and Role Collections are maintained within the space.