Introduction
Hi, my name is Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
You are watching a video tutorial that is part of a series about the SAP Business Technology
Platform, SAP Extension Suite certification.
The topic of this tutorial is SAP BTP.
This video was recorded in May 2022.
For the latest tutorials on the topic, please check the playlist.
In the previous video of this series we discussed the topic areas, here is the list, and in
this video we are going to cover SAP BTP, 15% weight, about 12 questions.
BTP, Business Technology Platform, is a rather vast topic, of course, and the exam page does
not provide more detailed information about what’s in and out of scope for the exam.
However, all questions are based on the content of the learning journey and for this topic
area, this concerns a brief high level introduction, Intelligent Enterprise, Business Technology
Platform, getting started, how to sign up for BTP Trial, the account model, and environments,
which provides the runtime, services, and tools to run business applications.
The platform hosts three environments: Cloud Foundry, ABAP, and Kyma but those familiar
with the platform will know that there is also a Neo environment, still supported, but
no longer available to new customers, and out of scope for the exam.
The illustrations are taken from the Business Technology Platform documentation on the SAP
Help Portal and I would recommend to read the Basic Platform Concepts section of the
guide.
Explains how all the different pieces fit together, solutions and services, regions,
environments, enterprise and trial accounts, commercial models, and the account mode and
directory structure.
Here in the documentation, SAP BTP is described as an integrated offering comprised of four
technology portfolios: database and data management, analytics, application development and integration,
and intelligent techologies.
This visualisation is often used in presentations and webinars.
In other words, BTP is a box, and inside there are four more boxes, and inside those boxes
we find both products for on-premises: SAP HANA, SAP BusinessObjects BI, SAP Process
Orchestration; as cloud-based services: SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Integration
Suite, and so on.
If we take a look at the SAP.com website, Products, Business Technology Platform, we
can see that portofolios have been changed slightly.
We now have five boxes with different lables, but what’s inside the box, the solutions,
is still quite the same Don’t get confused.
That’s marketing.
For the exam, keep this picture in mind.
Brief overview of the trial.
There is one hosted by AWS in the US and by Microsoft Azure in Singapore.
The cloud providers, also sometimes referenced as hyperscalers.
For the trial, Europe is no longer avialable.
Why’s that?
Well, as of TechEd 2021, SAP introduced a free tier environment for the business technology
platform, also at no cost, but with the advantage of an optional upgrade to a production environment.
This was not available for the trial.
Once the trial period is over, the environment and data is gone.
Eventually, one might guess, the trial will be phased out.
However, it is still part of the learning content for this exam, so let’s take a brief
look.
When you sign up, a global account, subaccount, org and space are created.
Takes a minute.
Org and space are Cloud Foundry concepts, we will cover this in another tutorial.
Global account and subaccount are BTP concepts, you need to be familiar with.
The global account is the commercial entity, your contract, the subaccount always points
to a cloud provider region, for the trial this is AWS US East.
This is relevant because not all services are available for each cloud provider and
for each region.
So, should you want to create an instance of SAP HANA Cloud, for example, you first
need to create a subaccount where this service is available.
We are looking here at the SAP BTP cockpit, with some tools and tutorials, and a link
to the SAP Store.
Here you can sign up for a pay-as-you-go subscription for the free tier.
Let’s access our trial.
Menu on the left, Account explorer,
Global account.
When we switch to a production environment, you’ll see that this looks exactly the same.
We can create subaccounts here and for this we need to select a cloud provider and region,
as combination, so not all cloud provider regions are available.
For Google Cloud only three, for example.
We also see the SAP regions for the Neo environment, which are only hosted from SAP data centers.
For this we have role collections, under security.
Initially, only two role collections are listed.
Global account administrator and viewer but as we start to create subaccounts and service
instances, additional role collection will be added.
A role collection contains roles and we grant role collections to users and groups (preferably),
as we cannot grant roles directly.
Then we have the service assignments, those are the services we can use, we can consume.
Here we have Cloud Foundry runtime, for example, Integration Suite, Kyma runtime, there are
many others.
These services need to be assigned to your global account, by SAP, as part of the contract.
Note that this does not include all products and services listed here as part of the BTP
portfolio.
Only a subset, a selection, only a few are mentioned here.
For those new to the platform but familiar with Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google
Cloud, this may be a bit confusing.
To know which services are available, we can go to the SAP Discovery Center, Service Catalog.
Here we find all services listed, whether a free tier is available, the license models,
provider, and region.
For example, the ABAP environment, time of recording, is only available for AWS, but
not for Azure or Google Cloud.
You are not expected to know all 95 services, and where they are available.
Just remember that you can look this up, the commercial information, on the SAP Discovery
Center.
If you want to learn more, for the HANA Academy, we also recorded an onboaring series, which
was recently updated, teaches you all you need to know, and more, about the platform.
The vidoes are hands-on, but you don’t have to follow along, you can just watch, for a
better understanding of how the platform actually works.
Highly recommended!
That’s it for the BTP topic area.
Coming up, the Cloud Foundry environment.
You can find the links to the resources mentioned in the description of this video below.
This video tutorial was recorded by Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
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