Describing the SAP BTP Technical Perspective

You want to learn more about the technical possibilities offered by SAP BTP.

Without slipping too much into the details, it is still necessary to divide the available services into groups to get an impression of the design of SAP BTP. The platform is fully service-enabled. As shown in the following figure, there are three main groupings of services ("planes").

Let's explore the three planes.

The Development services provide development tools and runtimes for the various developer personas, ranging from cloud-native developers to professional users.

Examples include:

• Extension Suite
• Low Code/ No Code
• Developer Experience and Tools

From a developer's point of view, you want to know how and what you can program.

As shown in the figure, the SAP Business Technology Platform supports three levels of programming models:

• Low/No-Code Model: Typically, the low/no-code layer is used for graphical workflow definition, business process modeling, creation and maintenance of forms and themes, UI customization, or business domain modeling, that is, to configure, customize and extend standard service behavior.
• High-Level Coding Model: SAP offers many APIs and special libraries that make programming easier and also more secure. An example of this is the Cloud SDK, which supports the reading of standardized OData interfaces from SAP SaaS applications.
• Flexible and Full-Control Development: Business application development is cloud-native development, where you can work with all known cloud patterns. This would be, for example, microservices according to the 12-factor principles as well as a server-less function and much more. These patterns are made possible by the two most important cloud runtimes, Cloud Foundry (the industry standard), and Kyma, based on Kubernetes (K8S).

From an architectural perspective, all kinds of capabilities are delivered as services, along all planes defined.

Depending on requirements and capabilities, SAP BTP offers three different programming levels:

• Low-Code/No-code
• High-Level Coding Model
• Full-Control Development Model

Read the blog "Low-Code/No-Code Development and Citizen Automation are the Future of Enterprise Resilience" to understand the benefits of low-code and no-code (LCNC). The advantages are as follows:

• Application development becomes faster and more flexible.
• Increases resilience (agility and resilience) in the company.
• Increases the security and reliability of the generated applications.