Script
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 the Cloud Foundry environment of the Business Technology Platform.
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 covered the BTP topic area and already briefly discussed
environments.
Cloud Foundry is listed as a separate topic area with 8% weight, 6 questions, give or
take.
In the training material the topic is a bit hidden.
Unit Manual deployment, d escribing Cloud Foundry in an overview (high level) with some
information about using the Cloud Foundry command line interface (CLI) and an exercise
about deploying a Cloud Foundry application to the platform.
For more information, we are directed to the SAP BTP documentation on the SAP Help Portal.
Here we can find information about what is supported and unsupported on the Business
Technology Platform.
Specific BTP features for Cloud Foundry, and availability zones, with a reference for even
more additional information.
The good news is that all of this is out of scope for the exam.
You won’t get any questions on this, and this also applies to the Cloud Foundry docs.
You are not expected to be familiar with the CF documentation.
What do we need to know?
How to get started, how to create an org, spaces, create an instance for the runtime;
we will look at this in a minute.
How to develop applications.
You need to be familiar with what’s inside these boxes and with this section of the documentation,
that’s the “dev” part, but you also need to be familiar a bit with the administration
side, account administration, org management using the BTP cockpit and the command line
interfaces, the CLI’s.
That’s it.
Now before we dive in.
Let’s answer one very simple question first.
What exactly is Cloud Foundry?
You can find an answer in the Cloud Foundry docs.
In essence, it’s a platform-as-a-service.
When compared to infrastructure-as-a-service, as provided by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft
Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, for example, you compute in the cloud by running virtual
machines, with the cloud provider taking care of the virtualisation and all the plumbing
that goes beneath, and you take care of the middleware, the runtime, data, and applications.
Cloud Foundry, as a platform as a service, further simplifies cloud computing by taking
care of the runtime and middleware as well.
You only manage your data and your apps.
In other words, you can think of Cloud Foundry as an application server in the cloud but
one that supports multiple runtimes: Java, Python, Node (JavaScript), .NET, Ruby, Go,
PHP, ABAP, and so on.
Okay, back to the SAP BTP Trial, using the BTP Cockpit
When we signed up for the trial, a subaccount was created automatically and this included
a Cloud Foundry environment.
Each environment has an API endpoint: api.cf.region.hana.ondemand.com, which we need to connect to the environment
using the command line tools.
A bit of legacy in the URL there: hana.ondemand.com Ondemand.com goes back to BusinessObjects
On-demand, 2008, reused for NetWeaver O-demand (Neo), 2012, later changed to the HANA Cloud
Platform, hence the hana part.
That’s for your information, there are no questions asked about the legacy stuff, of
course.
Each Cloud Foundry environment has an organisation name, an org name, which for the trial is
using the same name as the subacocunt and subdomain for that account.
This makes things a little easier, or maybe we should say a little less confusing, but
this is optional, when creating subaccounts and enabling Cloud Foundry you can use any
name you want.
Each org also needs a space (workspace, namespace), which we need to deploy our apps.
You can can create as many spaces as you want, and again, using any name you want.
There are no rules but there are some best practices, as documented in the SAP BTP documentation,
setup and plan, develop and build, deploy and deliver.
Recommended reading but beyond the scope of the exam.
To manually enable a Cloud Foundry environment, we would first start to create a subaccount,
enter a name, and select a region.
We have covered this in the previous video.
Then we need to check our entitlements.
Has Cloud Foundry been enabled for our account?
Have we signed up for this?
For the trial Cloud Foundry is always included, with a quota of 4 assignments, all currently
allocated.
Next we need to assign the entitlement to our subaccount, here called entity for some
reason.
In this case, we first need to configure the entitlements of the trial subaccount that
was created automatically, and reduce the number of units to two, for
example.
Save.
Now we can configure the entitlements for the sample subaccount we just created
add service plan Cloud Foundry
Available plan: Memory add service plan
assign units and save, takes a few seconds, and now both
entities, both subaccounts, have two Cloud Foundry units, with a remaining global quota
of 0 units.
4 units, 4 GB memory in the trial for your apps.
In production environment, you can assign as much memory as you want, as you need, or
more precisely, as you purchased.
This is an activity of the SAP BTP global account administrator.
Next, we enter the subaccount.
Here the subaccount administrator can take things over and enable Cloud Foundry.
You can change the instance name and org name, or leave as is, takes a few seconds, and here
we have our org.
The org name defaults to global account underscore subdomain.
We then also need to create a space and specify the space roles: manager, developer, or just
auditor (read-only).
These are Cloud Foundry roles, not BTP roles.
We do not have to assign role collections before we can start using the Cloud Foundry
environment.
We can access the space with the BTP cockpit and upload, deploy, applications.
At this level we can also create SAP HANA Cloud instances, configure routes (networking),
create security groups, add members to the space.
When we go back (or up) to the org level, we can add spaces, quota plans, org members,
this all concerns Cloud Foundry.
Not to be confused with the BTP subaccount where we can also configure security, add
users, assign role collections, we covered this in the previous video about the Business
Technology Platform but this may also map to the Kyma environment, for example.
Besides using the BTP cockpit, we can also use the BTP CLI, command line interface, to
enable the Cloud Foundry environment.
For this, go to useful links, tools, which points to tools.hana.ondemand.com
and here we can download both the Cloud Foundry CLI, the Cloud Foundry CLI plugin for the
SAP BTP, and the BTP CLI.
Requires some more explanation, and this we will cover in the next video.
One more thing, as mentioned in the previous video, the SAP HANA Academy also has published
an SAP BTP Onboarding video tutorial series, hands-on, which shows you exactly how this
all works with global acocunts, subaccounts, the command line interface, the Cloud Foundry
environment, ABAP, Kyma, and so on.
Highly recommended.
If you are completely new to Cloud Foundry, you might find the tutorials on the Cloud
Foundry Org web site about Cloud Foundry basics of interest and for those already familiar
with Cloud Foundry but who would like to learn more about how SAP got involved and also maybe
also how Cloud Foundry relates to Kubernetes, you may find these articles posted to the
SAP Community of interest.
Of course, this is all way beyond the scope of the exam.
In case you are interested.
That’s it for the Cloud Foundry topic area.
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.
Any good?
Give us a like, and for updates, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching.