SAP BTP: Architecture and Services

Analyzing SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)

Business Introduction
In your company, you want to write custom code and modify SAP solutions.
Modifications like in on-premise are not possible in the cloud, so you need to
find a way to fulfill your needs. You want to integrate the SaaS solutions from
SAP like SAP Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, and more into your SAP S/4HANA
Cloud to end up with a fully integrated set of software solutions and business
processes. In addition, you have third-party software that you want to
integrate. Your company generates and collects a lot of data. This data must be
managed and analyzed to get value from it.

SAP BTP: Introduction

SAP Business Technology Platform Deep Dive

At the infrastructure layer, SAP BTP consumes cloud infrastructure services such as computing
power, storage, and network either from one of the major hyperscalers (Amazon Web Services,
Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) in order to leverage hyperscaler economies
of scale, or directly in SAP’s own data centers with hyperscaler-like infrastructure in order to
leverage benefits such as built-in compliance or exclusive regional availability. The SAP BTP offers
four functionality areas with lots of functions, services, and applications:

Application Development
The application development capabilities of the SAP BTP is a portfolio of solutions, tools, and
frameworks that help you simplify software development of your application extensions or custom
applications. It offers functionalities for different levels of development experience and to increase
the overall development productivity even with no-code through SAP Build or low-code capabilities
in SAP Business Application Studio

Automation
SAP Build Process Automation helps you innovate and adapt to change by making workflow
management and task automation simpler and faster. The solution helps you build with simplicity by
allowing business users to use intuitive no-code, drag-and-drop tools to create workflows and
automate tasks.

Integration
Our integration platform as a service (iPaaS) allows you to publish and connect processes
and integrate data across your landscape and value chain. SAP Integration Suite helps
streamline SAP and third-party solution integrations with thousands of prebuilt integrations,
so you can take a systemic approach toward solving common integration challenges with a
proven methodology.

Data & Analytics

Data
Data solutions provide the ability to handle the growing amounts of data stored in multiple locations
with controlled access for your entire organization to analyze and act on a single version of truth.
Topics like SAP HANA Cloud and solutions for data integration, data cataloging and so on are part of
this area.

Analytics
Empower your people to uncover and act on real-time insights with our AI-powered business
intelligence (BI) and analytics tools. Analyze past and present situations - and simulate and prepare
for the future. The analytics capabilities of SAP BTP will meet your needs for business intelligence,
business warehousing, or enterprise planning.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence powers SAP Business Technology Platform, changing the way we live and work
by optimizing processes, maximizing resources, and igniting innovation with the right combination of
AI.

SAP BTP Commercial Models

Pay-As-You-Go
This commercial model lets you sign up to start using cloud services in your production environment
with no upfront cost, no minimum usage requirements, and no financial commitments. Pay-As-You-
Go (PAYG) for SAP BTP helps you start small and grow without constraints. You can easily start with
this commercial model through the SAP Store.

What does this mean?

Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP allows you to build applications in your production environment and pay
only for what you use

You can start small, build productive apps, and convert to the Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement
once you have achieved predictable usage

Respond quickly to changing business needs with confidence by delivering productive applications
and scaling them fast

With no minimum usage requirements, you can avoid over-provisioning

Access to free tier service plans to try out services without any costs within your productive
environment

CPEA
Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) is a commercial model that allows for the consumption
of cloud credits based on actual usage. These cloud credits get paid upfront like a pre-paid model.

What does this mean?

Get access to all services available under CPEA and configure them in your global account with just
one contract. This includes new features or innovations available after the contract signing date

Choose how to spend cloud credits and monitor real-time service usage to better understand project
costs
Consume services based on project requirements, without having to change your contract, and only
get charged for what is used

Access to free tier service plans to try out services without any costs within your productive
environment

Subscription
This commercial model lets you choose a fixed set of services for a fixed rate, regardless of actual
consumption.

What does this mean?

The contract includes the exact services you can use in your project and will be provisioned in your
global account for entitlements

The entitled cloud services can be used up to the limit of your purchased subscription. To use more,
you can increase your license volume

You can add new services or modify your contract by contacting your SAP sales representative or by
visiting the SAP Store

You can optimize your cost by knowing exactly what you need, get higher discounts, and benefit
from budget security throughout the contract period

Free Tier Services in a Nutshell

Each free tier service plan is limited by usage capacity on a monthly basis

Free tier service plans do not expire

You can consume free tier services for as long as your account is active, and you have not reached
the service plan limits

If you have a PAYG/CPEA account, you automatically have access to the free tier service plans

Upgrade to a paid service plan through the SAP BTP cockpit – no technical migration required
 Illustrating the Architecture of SAP BTP
Architecture of SAP BTP

SAP BTP: Regions

You can deploy applications in different regions. Each region represents a geographical location (for
example, Europe, US East) where applications, data, or services are hosted. A region is chosen at the
subaccount level. For each subaccount, you select exactly one region. The selection of a region is
dependent on many factors: for example, application performance (response time, latency) can be
optimized by selecting a region close to the user. The global account itself is also running in a region.

Infrastructure
The infrastructure layer of a region is either provided by SAP or by one of SAP's Instrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) partners Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP),
and Alibaba Cloud.

Environments
Environments constitute the actual platform as a service offering of SAP BTP that allows for the
development and administration of business applications. Each environment comes equipped with
the tools, technologies, and runtimes that you need to build applications.

Services
Services enable, facilitate, or accelerate the development of business applications and other
platform services on SAP BTP. You find all available services in the SAP Discovery Center.

Data
Your business and application data is managed through services like the SAP HANA Cloud service or
the SAP Datasphere service.

Applications
The business applications that you deploy in a region build on top of, and make use of, the layers
underneath.

SAP BTP: Subaccount

Each subaccount is associated with a region, which is the physical location where applications, data,
or services are hosted. The specific region is relevant when you deploy applications and access the
SAP BTP cockpit using the corresponding cockpit URL. The region assigned to your subaccount
doesn't have to be directly related to your location. You could be located in the United States, for
example, but operate your subaccount in Europe.

The entitlements and quotas that have been purchased for a global account have to be assigned to
the individual subaccounts.

The terms global accounts and subaccounts and their meaning in scope of SAP BTP are not referring
to user accounts or user management.

SAP BTP: Environments

Environments constitute the actual Platform as a Service offering of SAP BTP that allows for the
development and administration of business applications. Environments are anchored in SAP BTP on
the subaccount level.

Each environment comes equipped with specific tools, technologies, and runtimes that you need to
build applications. So a multi-environment subaccount is your single address to host a variety of
applications and offer diverse development options. One advantage of using different environments
in one subaccount is that you only need to manage users, authorizations, and entitlements once per
subaccount, and thus, grant more flexibility to your developers.
Environments for Your Applications
Entity Relationships Between Global Account, Directory, and Subaccounts

The figure Entity Relationships Between Global Account, Directory, and Subaccounts depicts the
relationship between a global account, its directories, subaccounts, environments, regions,
entitlements, and quotas for feature set B.

A subaccount is specified for the environment Neo or for the environment Multi-Environment
(KYMA, ABAP, and Cloud Foundry environment).

Demonstrating the SAP BTP Cockpit

SAP BTP Cockpit
The SAP BTP cockpit is the central user interface for administering and managing your SAP BTP
accounts as a platform user. To access the SAP BTP cockpit, you need to open a specific URL:
https://<Region>.cockpit.btp.cloud.sap. You can replace the region with the one you are operating in
(for example: eu10, us10, ap10) to have a lower response time and latency to the cockpit. After
logging in with your user credentials, you might get prompted with a pop-up to choose the global
account you want to access. Of course, you are able to switch between the global accounts as
needed.

That business users need to access the SAP BTP cockpit is not required and not suitable normally.
The business users get access by calling URLs that directly point to the capabilities and
functionalities.

Alternatives to SAP BTP Cockpit

Working with the SAP BTP cockpit is the easiest way to manage and administer your SAP BTP
accounts. Besides that, you can also use the SAP BTP CLI, a command line interface for managing the
SAP BTP accounts or API calls.

When you want to manage the Kyma environment, you need to use the Kyma Dashboard, or you can
use the Kubernetes command-line tool: kubectl.

For managing the Cloud Foundry environment, you can use the SAP BTP cockpit or the Cloud
Foundry command-line interface: cf cli.

To work with the ABAP environment, you need to use Kyma or Cloud Foundry and, on top of that,
you could subscribe to the Web access for ABAP service to get an administrative SAP Fiori Launchpad
for the ABAP environment.

Identifying the Services in SAP BTP

Services in SAP BTP
Services Types in SAP BTP
A lot of capabilities from SAP BTP are delivered as services. Some of the services are always for free,
while other ones need to get paid for additionally. Before you can utilize a service, you need to
subscribe to it or create an instance of your selected service. Before doing that, you need to be
familiar with the service plans which are available for this service to select the right one for your
scenario. You can get more information about the existing service plans of a service in the SAP
Discovery Center or the documentation on the SAP Help Portal. We can differentiate between two
types of services: There are lots of services available and you can use them for several use cases.
Services can be instantiated or subscribed.
Example Use of Services on SAP BTP
In the figure, Example Use of Services on SAP BTP, you see a potential use case for some services.

Your developers have the task to develop a SAPUI5 application with SAP Cloud Application
Programming Model. This application should be hosted on the SAP BTP.

The developers decide to use the SAP Business Application Studio as the IDE. For the Continuous
Integration and Delivery pipeline, they use the Continuous Integration & Delivery service of SAP BTP.
The application gets deployed inside the Cloud Foundry Environment of the SAP BTP. The developers
use the SAP HANA Cloud to store data of the application (database as a service).

While you want the operation and productive use of the application to ensure security through
authorization management, you want to write logs and handle load automatically.

For the authorization, your developers use the Authorization and Trust Management service. For the
logs, they can connect the application to the Application Logging Service. For handling loads
dynamically, your developers can create an instance of the Application Autoscaler, configure it with
scaling rules, and bind it to the application.

In addition to the use case from this scenario, there are more potential use cases and even more
services that could be used.

SAP Discovery Center

Key capabilities:
• Service catalog offers information about out-of-the-box services, tools, APIs, and
applications that help you integrate and extend your solutions
• Mission catalog with ready-to-run projects that offer real support for an implementation
project
• Learning materials and step-by-step guidance
• Dedicated coaches for assistance and integration with the SAP Community

Benefits:
• Relevant, on-demand material and support
• Rapidly accelerates innovation
• Low-touch enablement, self-service online tool
SAP Discovery Center - Services Overview

In the Services part of the SAP Discovery Center, you can get information about all services that SAP
offers on SAP BTP. You can browse by category, or you can use the search bar. If you have found a
service you are interested in, you can click on it and the service details will display.

SAP Discovery Center - Mission Detail

 Analyzing Connectivity in SAP BTP
Connectivity in SAP BTP
Why do we need Connectivity in SAP BTP?
As an intelligent, sustainable enterprise, you follow the clean core strategy. You want to build side-
by-side extensions or custom development projects, but integrate them to capabilities or data from
the internet or your on-premise system landscape. You need to connect them to each other. For
this, the SAP BTP offers connectivity functionalities.

Connectivity Services
The SAP Connectivity service provides a connectivity proxy that can be used to access on-premise
resources through a Cloud Connector. Through the use of the SAP Destination service, you can
retrieve and store the technical information about the target resource (destination) that you need to
connect your application to a remote service or system (internet or cloud connector).

What is the Cloud Connector?

The Cloud Connector connects SAP on-premise backends (or even supported non-SAP systems) to
SAP BTP subaccounts via an encrypted tunnel. The connection is bidirectional. From an architectural
point of view, the Cloud Connector is a possible single point of failure. For this purpose, there is also
the possibility of high availability, monitoring, alerting, and more. You need to set up the Cloud
Connector in your landscape and connect it to your SAP BTP subaccounts. Then, you need to define
which system resources are shared. You access resources shared through the Cloud Connector with
consuming Destinations.

The Cloud Connector combines an easy setup with a clear configuration of the systems that are
exposed to the SAP BTP, letting you use existing on-premise assets without exposing the entire
internal landscape and act as a reverse invoke proxy between the on-premise network and SAP BTP.

Connectivity Types
In principle, there are two types of connections to and from the SAP BTP:

Internet Connectivity.
Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity (or other way around).
Internet Connectivity is needed when you want to consume capabilities or data from a resource on
the internet, while Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity is used when you want to utilize your existing
on-premise landscape resources. The Internet Connectivity can be reached via HTTPS, while the
connection to an on-premise system requires the Cloud Connector. The communication is bi-
directional.