SAP Cloud Platform Service Catalog

Neuert · ‎04-16-2020

SAP Cloud Platform Service Catalog

In these challenging times it’s difficult to talk about business. Everyone is facing a lot of challenges and has to adjust processes and models. With the SAP Cloud Platform Service Catalog, we’d like to empower Solution Architects and Development Teams to reduce uncertainty and complexity to support their line of business.

The service catalog is the connecting piece of the puzzle in the overall end-to-end user experience of SAP Cloud Platform. Your journey starts with SAP.com providing a high-level overview of the platform for business users (Why). The Discovery Center shows you the available services in the service catalog (What), and the missions (How). Solution architects and development teams can find all necessary information about the services they need, and the use cases (missions) for implementing the services into a business solution.

The services in the catalog helps you to simplify your integration and accelerate the development of your application extensions within a multi-cloud architecture. We offer two service suites:

Integration Suite accelerates enterprise-grade integration of heterogeneous landscapes using out-of-the-box content to seamlessly integrate end-to-end processes, data, people, and devices.

Extension Suite provides an easy and fast way to enhance and/or adapt SAP solutions, to meet customers’ unique needs and to gain a competitive advantage.

Each service comes with:

best practices from our experts

enterprise tools to administrate, monitor, configure and develop services

ready-to-use business content

tutorials and learnings

commercial aspects

related real business use cases/missions

In this blog I will show you what and where you can find it in the service catalog. Here’s a quick and easy way to all this information. I hope it helps!

Access SAP Cloud Platform Service Catalog

You can access the SAP Cloud Platform Service Catalog via the Discovery Center:

https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/

In the navigation on the left side, choose (hint: you can expand the navigation menu with labels by clicking in the top left corner of the Discovery Center screen).

Or you can use the direct link:

https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/index.html#/serviceCatalog

The Service Catalog consists of mainly two parts: The overview page and the service page.

Overview Page

This page gives you an overview and the number of existing services. The services are structured by capabilities (same as in the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit). To find the right service it is possible to sort, search and filter.

You can filter by commercial model (e.g. Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement or Subscription) or in the next release license model (e.g. service which have a trial service plan), by Provider (SAP [Neo], AWS, Azure, GCP – all Cloud Foundry), or Regions (e.g. Europe (Netherlands), Japan (Tokyo), US East, Virginia). You can even find services by key features. You can also sort or search within the filtered services.

Service Page

The service page is divided into three different parts:

Feature

Service Plans

Related Missions (if available)

Feature

The feature section lists what you can do with the service. (1) In the header the service name with a short description including the service icon. A short introduction of the service (2) with media files (3) gives you a first impression of the service. (4) A summary of the functions and features rounds up the overview of the service.

New in the service catalog is the topic “Tools” (5). With tools, users can develop, configure, monitor and administer a service or entities managed by a service. A tool can be part of the platform or a service but is not a service by itself. When clicking on a tools button, further information is provided in a separate browser window.

(6) SAP Cloud Platform is part of the business technology platform, so services provide many business-critical features as APIs in the SAP API Business hub.

(7) To understand the service in detail, the resource section provides you with links such as:

Initial Setup

Feature Scope Description

What’s New

What is

And more…

(8) Last but not least: links to tutorials and learnings round up the information about the service.

Service Plans

In the “Service Plans” section all information around the license models are displayed. Currently we have (1) two different license models – “Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement” (CPEA) and “Subscription”. Additional models are planned to be included. “Pure-Pay-as-you-go” is in pilot phase and could be added soon.

Some services have more than one service plan and with the (2) filters you can choose the preferred one. You can choose to see only the provider and/or the region/data center you’re interested in. You can also see the price in different currencies (3).

The service plan is the same that you find in the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit (4) with the respective description.

The area “Available in:” (5) shows the provider and data centers where the service is accessible.

Detailed pricing (6) information including metric, block sizes and unit prices per month/hours.

(7) If the service is available via license model “CPEA”, it is possible to add it to SAP Cloud Platform Estimator.

(8) In the menu bar information about the current estimate is stored. Like estimate header, description, number of services and sections and the total.

Related Missions

Missions represent the scenarios you can implement using this service. You can view the related missions by navigating to the respective tab.

You could not only start immediately the missions you choose; you can also see how other customers/partners have implemented the same scenario (mission) for their particular use case. You can also activate the service from the recipes included in missions.

Outlook

We are constantly working to improve the service catalog. Some of the features we intend to work on in the coming months are*:

Add service directly from card to the estimator on the overview page

Link Pricing Examples

Link supplement information

Add services with certain service plan to estimator

SAP Store integration

Trial Service Plans

List view of all services

)* subject to change without notice.

Additional Information

Are you new to the entire SAP Cloud Platform? Read the Getting Started documentation, or try the Starter Scenarios in the Tutorial Navigator.

From inspiration to implementation, the discovery center leads customers from SAP Cloud Platform use cases with pain points and benefits to successful go-lives. For more details on the discovery center and missions, read this blog by cecily.sorenson.

If you’re new to the world of the consumption-based commercial model or CPEA, I highly recommend that you read these two blogs, previously published by me and ralf.schaub: