Experience the new way of consuming and managing services on SAP Cloud Platform

As of September 10, we’ve implemented a new simplified approach to viewing, consuming and managing your services on SAP Cloud Platform. It’s important to note that these enhancements are based greatly on your feedback, so we’d like to thank all our customers for actively helping us make SAP Cloud Platform better with each passing release.

Now, let’s get into the details. We’ve made some key improvements related to service consumption and lifecycle management that we think will boost productivity and overall user experience.

Service Marketplace available on Subaccount level

Until now, the service marketplace was only available on a Cloud Foundry space level. Aside from the extra clicks, this also meant that services were very closely coupled to a specific environment, in this case Cloud Foundry. By moving the service marketplace up to the subaccount level, we’ve enabled service cross-consumption on multi-cloud, so that, for example, you can easily consume platform services in your Kyma Runtime. To make it easy to see which service is available in which environment, we’ve added this information to the service tile.

Service Marketplace on Subaccount Level

I’d like to briefly discuss what Other means in this context. As a platform, we offer services that are decoupled from the existing environments and runtimes (Cloud Foundry, Kyma, etc). In this case, service instances and service bindings are created in your subaccount and therefore can be consumed by external systems. This is, for example, how you would consume SAP Cloud Platform services within SAP SuccessFactors. For more information, check out this topic in the SAP Help Portal.

Service Instances available on Subaccount level

As with the Service Marketplace, we’ve also moved the Service Instances to the subaccount level. This means the lifecycle management of your service instances can now also be performed per subaccount, not just on a space level. This enhancement means you can manage service instances created across multiple environments on the same page.

Services Instances on a Subaccount Level

Now you can create, update or delete service instances without navigating to your space. However, in case you’d like to go to your space, we’ve added a quick link, for easy access.

View of service instances created in your Cloud Foundry environment

And if you’d like to see more information about a specific service instance, you can simply click on the line to view, for example, bound applications and service keys.

View details of your service instance

We’ll talk more about this new UI (Flexible Column Layout) as this is another key enhancement. But as a teaser, the main ideas were to avoid back and forth navigation pains and create a 360 experience (reducing “dead-ends” and enabling related actions from different pages within the cockpit).

On a similar note, I’d also like to highlight the new service instance creation wizard. I know… it’s a mouthful, but it’s worth it. Not only have we simplified the service instance creation process, we’ve included this wizard throughout the cockpit, again enabling a 360 experience. Depending on where you’ve launched the wizard, you might see some pre-populated content. For example, launch it directly from a service tile in the Marketplace and the service is provided by default. Other fields, like service plan, are also pre-populated when there is only one option:

Create a service instance

If you launch it from the Service Instance page, simply select your desired service from the drop-down menu and go from there.

The wizard also recognizes when some key prerequisites are missing and provides embedded support to complete them. For example, let’s say you’ve created a subaccount, and want to create a Service Instance in Cloud Foundry. But you’ve forgotten to create a space. Once you’ve launched the wizard, and provided the initial fields, it will prompt you to create a space and open the space creation dialog so you can continue. All this without having to abandon the service instance creation process. Essentially, we’re trying to eliminate that “dead-end” experience.

Create a new space within the service instance creation wizard

Introducing the Flexible Column Layout

I already teased this a little when talking about service instances, but another major improvement is the implementation of an SAP Fiori design concept – Flexible Column Layout. Thanks to this implementation, you as an SAP Cloud Platform user can now see much more information on just one screen. No need to navigate back and forth from the overview page, to the details page, to the applications page, etc. You can see all (or most) of the relevant information on the same screen – across multiple columns. As an example, in the Service Marketplace, select a tile to see more details:

View service details on the same screen

Summary

Just to recap, we’ve discussed:

• Service Marketplace and Service Instance on subaccount level aligned with our multi-cloud strategy
• New wizard for Service Instance creation with contextual information and embedded support
• New UI with integrated Flexible Column Layout for both Service Marketplace and Service Instances pages

Ready to try it out? This was released on both productive and trial accounts, for feature set A and feature set B. So regardless of your account type, you can already try out all the updates mentioned above.

Note: Detailed documentation is available on our SAP Help Portal. For more information, see here.