SAP Business Technology Platform : Account Models

In this blog post, I would like to provide an overview of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Account Models and how to use them. As of last week, an Account Explorer page has been introduced and anyone logging into their SAP BTP account would now see this as the default landing page. I’ll focus more on some of the new capabilities which have been available with Feature Set B

Global Account:

As a customer, when you subscribe to SAP BTP, you are provisioned a Global account. This is a realization of the contract you made with SAP. Within the Global account, you can manage and create several entities like Directories and Subaccounts as well as allocate entitlements & Quotas to them. You can define users at the Global account level who can manage this account model (Roles – Global Account Administrator & Global Account Viewer)

Directories:

Directories allow you to group related subaccounts and create a hierarchy. With the recent update, you can have upto 5 levels of nested directories. Directories are entities which have been introduced with Feature Set B. So why would one need to use them:

• Enables you to group subaccounts based on different department, Lines-of-Business, Geography, Subsidiaries etc. For example, there could be a department that has funding and want to have more control on the application or interface deployed on SAP BTP subaccount, this structure would help in providing the relevant access to the department staff
• Filter based on custom properties/tags. You can create custom properties against each of the directory to search for all the relevant entities. The subaccounts under a directory inherit these custom properties and tags.
• Monitor usage & cost at directory level. For example, each department will have full visibility of the usage and cost associated with their apps. This can help in 3^rd party billing as well as cost chargebacks.
• Allocate Service entitlement and quotas. You can allocate quota for services to the directory from the global account quota for distribution to the directory’s subaccounts.

Similar to the Global account, you can also add users at directory level to manage directory entitlements (Directory Admin, Directory Viewer)

Subaccounts:

Subaccounts are the lowest entities in the hierarchy. Its at the subaccount level, where you will be deploying your apps, databases and interfaces. Subaccounts are regions specific – meaning you can decide in which country you want to setup your subaccount environment. All the service entitlement & quotas which have been purchased and allocated via the Global Account/Directories will be consumed within these subaccounts. You also have an option to add additional custom properties/tag at the subaccount level to make it easy to search and report on them. As a subaccount administrator, you will be able to add your developers/admins to the subaccount to support with the required tasks.

For illustration purposes, I have come up this Account Model. There are 3 departments who would like to have control and manage their respective subaccounts. I have also shown the use of custom properties like Cost Center, Department at directory level and Owner property at subaccount level.

When you login to your SAP BTP Global account, you will get to see the Directory & Subaccounts in table view within the Account Explorer. You can easily add these entities using the create option at the top left-hand corner.

You can switch to the tree view to better visualize this. To keep it simple, I haven’t nested the directories. You could do this when you have multiple projects running within a directory and would like to keep things separate.

For each of the directories, you can add custom properties.

These custom properties help in searching and filtering the relevant entities. Notice that the subaccounts have inherited the same and hence they show up in the search.

Clicking on the Directory will take you to the overview page of the directory. From here you can do several operations like

• Assign users who would need to manage/view the directory level settings
• View usage of the services within the subaccounts under this directory
• Quota assignments

As you can see below, this directory has been assigned quota of 2 units of Cloud Foundry runtime from the available 20 units of the Global account. In the directories, you also have the option to auto-assign an amount of quota to all subaccounts created or moved to that directory.

As a developer when I navigate to the Automation subaccounts within the Finance directory, I would only be able to consume these two units of Cloud Foundry runtime.

The Usage Analytics has also been updated to enable administrators to view the usage.

This setup of Account Models gives more flexibility to organizations and help them manage the resources, landscape, and entitlements for their departments and projects in a self-service manner.

For more information on this topic, please refer the SAP Help documentation. Here is also a checklist for the account model setup along with more example from the best practices.