From studying the SAP Activate Road Map and his previous discussions with Carl, Adam has learned that it is his task as a system administrator to request the necessary systems for the business processes to be implemented.
Hint
For the provisioning and onboarding of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, it is essential to understand the system landscape. Without understanding the overall landscape, you cannot get the full extent of how SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition systems work and, at the same time, how they are linked with SAP Activate (which, together with SAP Cloud ALM, is the fundamental tool for the implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition). It is highly recommended that you follow the SAP Activate Road Map Viewer judiciously to have a streamlined and optimized result in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
To get an idea of how this landscape will look, Adam again contacts Carl. During their next meeting, Carl developed the following figure:
Note
For the sake of simplicity, this figure only contains the systems relevant for running in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition within a 3-system landscape. Other environments (such as SAP Ariba) are not shown.
Note
The System Roles Starter, Development, Test, and Production identify which components are used for this purpose. Technically, the Starter Customizing Tenant and the Starter Development Tenant belong to the same System. In our example of the Starter System.
From his experience with on-premise based SAP software, Adam recognizes the development, test, and production systems. But he has no idea what, for example, the SAP Central Business Configuration tenant is used for. Carl therefore needs to explain the roles of the different systems on a high level:
- SAP for Me is the central personalized access point and the go-to destination for all customers' SAP engagements.
SAP Central Business Configuration (CBC) acts as a configuration hub for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. In SAP Central Business Configuration, you can centrally manage new implementations of cloud solutions from SAP via Project Experience.
Note
Project Experience guides you step-by-step through the whole implementation process.
- SAP Cloud ALM helps to manage your implementation and operate your system landscape.
The Starter system includes configuration and master data for your SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution for targeted enablement of the project team on SAP standard processes. It serves as the environment for the fit-to-standard workshops. It is decommissioned one month after the production system is delivered.
Note
In the starter system (as well as in the development system), there are two separate tenants for development and for customization.
The systems that finally form the three-system landscape (the Starter tenants are only in use during the evaluation phase) :
- The Development system provides a safe environment for development projects, including advanced coding projects. It is divided into several tenants with specific purposes: the customizing tenant, the development tenant, and the parallel customizing tenant.
- The Development Tenant provides access to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment. In this environment, you can build custom developments based on lifecycle-stable SAP objects.
- Customizing Tenant for business configuration and key user extensibility
- Parallel Customizing Tenant here you can develop configuration enhancements without affecting the main line
- The Test system is your quality assurance environment during implementation. It will act as a test environment during the implementation.
- Test Tenant: you can test both your custom developments and configurations before forwarding them to the production system
- Parallel Test Tenant to test configuration enhancements without affecting the main line.
- The Production system is where your business will transact, plan, and run. The Production system has one Production Tenant.
- The Development system provides a safe environment for development projects, including advanced coding projects. It is divided into several tenants with specific purposes: the customizing tenant, the development tenant, and the parallel customizing tenant.
SAP Cloud Identity Services are a group of services of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which enable you to integrate identity and access management (IAM) between systems. The goal is to provide a seamless single sign-on (SSO) experience across systems while ensuring secure system and data access. They consist of
- SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication for the secure authentication and single sign-on for users in the cloud (and to assign CBC user roles to CBC users).
- SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Provisioning to read CBC users from the Identity Authentication tenant and provision them to the CBC client.
Two tenants (to separate development/test and production) are typical.
Note
A Sandbox Tenant (optional, not shown in the figure above) is a subscription-based tenant isolated from the customer’s development, test, and productive systems. Its primary purpose is to help evaluate and test application configurations and extensions.