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Rui-Nogueira
Advisor
Advisor

The adoption of SAP BTP services by SAP customers and partners is steadily increasing. Many customers are utilizing SAP BTP services in their mission critical business processes.


At the same time, the speed of software development is increasing. So that means, projects on SAP BTP have to be set up fast, reliably, and in a repeatable fashion.


How can we address these challenges on SAP BTP?



Setup SAP BTP accounts & services with btp-setup-automator


With the btp-setup-automator tool developers can use an open-source tool that helps them with the automation tasks on setting-up their SAP BTP accounts and services. The btp-setup-automator was delivered in March 2022 to help developers with such setup tasks. And there is already some traction on the open-source tool: partners like e.g. Uniorg are using it to setup the SAP Business Technology Platform for their customers as you can see on their udina web-page.


One thing that is maybe not obvious to everyone using the tool today: you need to have machine-readable metadata, describing everything there is to know about resources on the SAP Business Technology Platform, to make this work. The btp-setup-automator is making use of such data from the very beginning. And as such data might be usable for other development tasks as well, SAP is exposing that data today through a new open source GitHub repository for BTP service metadata.



SAP BTP service metadata on GitHub


The GitHub repository for btp-service-metadata provides machine readable metadata about all the SAP BTP services available via an SAP BTP account with a pay-as-you-go license. All of that as an open-source project.



In order to make the data easy to digest and considering the different needs of different personas we decided to store the data in a persona-based approach starting with developers. The structure is therefore stored in a directory called v0/developer with JSON files containing service metadata, one file per service.


As an example here are some screenshots from the exposed JSON structure for the process-automation service:


In addition, the inventory list provides an overview of all available services to enable to have a quick overview what is available and what is not.




How to use machine-readable SAP BTP service metadata?


Using other tools like jq or your own code, there is a lot you can do with that data. You can for example create automatically generated human-readable pages like a documentation page per service. Need more inspiration? Checkout the metadata-exploration page from this repo on how to access and use the data.



Way forward: let us know your feedback!


Based on your feedback we will add additional personas and curated metadata. Therefore, please let us know:




  • Is the data useful to you?

  • How are you using that data and for which purpose?

  • Do you think we should have other output formats of the data?

  • Do you see wrong information in the repo?


Please engage with us on the GitHub page itself. You can raise issues or provide feature requests around the SAP BTP service metadata. You can as well start discussions on the GitHub repository to raise questions in case you have some.


Thanks a lot!

Best,
Rui
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