SAP BTP Developer Onboarding | Hands-on Video Tutorials

UPDATE: May 2022 The onboarding series has been updated. For the latest version, visit SAP BTP Developer Onboarding 2022 | Hands-on Video Tutorials The information presented in this blog is no longer current.

Hands-On Video Tutorials

Philip MUGGLESTONE just updated his developer onboarding video tutorial series for the SAP Business Technology Platform. In this blog, you will find the videos embedded with some additional information and resources. Following along in the patented zero-to-hero format, no prior knowledge required, you will be ready to start developing business applications on the platform with minimal effort and no time wasted.

You can watch the first six video tutorials in about 45 minutes. What you learn is

• How to create and configure SAP Cloud Platform accounts
• How to configure service instances
• How to develop full-stack applications with Business Application Studio

Ready? Let’s dive straight in.

To bookmark the playlist on YouTube, go to

• SAP Business Technology Platform Onboarding

Because we know your time is precious, we have included code snippets so you can easily and merrily code along. For the GitHub repository with sample code, go to

• github.com/saphanaacademy/scpapps

Getting Started

In the first video, we introduce the SAP Business Technology Platform, review the documentation, and discuss environments, capabilities, regions, service providers, and services. We sign up for a trial account and showcases several SAP HANA Academy playlists that focus on key BTP  topics.

• SAP Business Technology Platform – product information including estimator tool
• SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) | SAP Help Portal

 

Environments, Regions, and Services

SAP Business Technology Platform is an enterprise platform-as-a-service (enterprise PaaS) with three environments: Cloud Foundry, Kyma and ABAP. The original Neo environment is still accessible but no longer documented (legacy).

These environments are hosted from different regions by several cloud providers. Not all services are available in every region. This is documented in the

• SAP Cloud Platform Regions and Service Portfolio

SAP provides the infrastructure for the Neo environment (legacy) plus additional services (e.g. Big Data, Identity Authentication, API Business Hub).

The infrastructure for the services on the Cloud Foundry and ABAP environments is provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Alibaba Cloud.

Free Trial Account

There are two type of accounts for the platform: Global (enterprise) and trial (limited version, valid for 30 days).

• Start Free Trial

The Service Assignment menu shows the available services for the trial account.

Global Accounts

In the second tutorial, we log on to the SAP BTP Cockpit with a global account and review

• Members
• Systems (SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors)
• Entitlements
• Subaccounts (projects or usage-based)
• Recipes for subaccount creation and configuration

Subaccounts

In this video tutorial, Philip shows how to create a subaccount using the SCP cockpit using either recipes, recommended when available, or manually, which requires some additional knowledge (as shown in the tutorial).

Subaccounts map to a regional data center of an infrastructure provider so we need to lookup first in the SAP Cloud Platform Regions and Service Portfolio where infrastructure for a service is located.

Provision Services

In this video tutorial, Philip shows how to provision services in a subaccount using the Document Information Extraction AI service as an example.

Not all services are the same. Some services we need to subscribe to; this is illustrated in the next video where we subscribe to the Business Application Studio. For others, we need to create service instances. Popular examples are ABAP and HANA Cloud but in this tutorial we subscribe to the Document Information Extraction service.

Steps

Assign a service plan for a particular service to a subaccount.

Access the service from the Service Marketplace in the space of your Cloud Foundry organization.

Create an instance by choosing the service plan, specify parameter (JSON), and optionally binding the service to existing applications.

Bind the service to your application and/or create a service key to access the service from your application.

Subscribe to SAP Business Application Studio

In this video tutorial, we subscribe to the SAP Business Application Studio service from the subscription menu. We do not need to create a service instance for this service (as above).

SAP Business Application Studio, SAP’s new IDE for cloud-native application development on the Cloud Foundry environment.

For more information, visit

• SAP Business Application Studio – documentation on the SAP Help Portal
• SAP Business Application Studio – SAP Community

Steps

From the trial account, we can subscribe to the SAP Business Application Studio service.

Before we can access the service, we need to assign the appropriate role collections to our trial account.

We can access the SAP Business Application Studio from the SAP Cloud Platform. To save a few clicks, you might want to bookmark the link,

Setup CLI

In this video tutorial, we install and configure the command line interface (CLI) the Cloud Foundry environment.

We can download the CLI from GitHub

•  Cloud Foundry CLI

For macOS, you can use brew. For Windows, there is the cf_installer.exe.

brew install cloudfoundry/tap/cf-cli

For the documentation, see

• Cloud Foundry CLI Reference Guide

To use the CLI, we first need to set the API endpoint, logon, and set org and space. We can found this information on the Subaccount page in the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit.

# set API endpoint
cf api https://api.cf.eu10.hana.ondemand.com

# log on (l)
cf l -u user@domain.com

# list apps
cf a

# list services
cf s

# install plugin
cf install-plugin multiapps

Next Steps

SAP Business Application Studio

For more information, visit

• SAP Business Application Studio – documentation on the SAP Help Portal
• SAP Business Application Studio – SAP Community
• Build a Business Application Using CAP for Java – SAP Developer Center tutorial

 

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Best,

Denys van Kempen