Usage Scenario
Your company is planning to develop a set of applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). You have a diverse team of developers with different skill sets. Some team members have worked in the SAP ecosystem for many years and are especially proficient in ABAP development and the SAP application server ABAP. Other team members joined your company recently and have a skill set around web development. They are used to programming languages like Java and JavaScript and some even have experience in cloud application platforms like Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes.
The applications that you are going to develop must meet a wide variety of requirements. In some cases, you just want to build a custom UI for some data object that is already provided by your backend SAP S/4HANA system. In other cases, you want to extend the existing data model from the backend system with custom entities and data that should be managed independently of your core system. And then you also want to develop more complex and highly scalable applications that follow a microservice architecture pattern and integrate with a multitude of other services and applications.
The available environments on the SAP BTP meet these complex requirements.
Key Characteristics of SAP BTP Environments
Environments constitute the actual platform-as-a-service offering of SAP BTP that enables the development and administration of business applications. Each environment is equipped with the tools, technologies, and runtimes that you need to build applications.
- A runtime provides your applications with the environment and infrastructure to be executed.
- A tool is something that lets you interact with the runtime environment, for example, a command line interface or a software development kit (SDK).
- A service is something that your application depends on, like an SAP HANA Cloud database.
The availability of different environments allows for greater flexibility in your development process.
Neo Environment
The Neo environment, historically, was the first environment available on the SAP BTP – though at the time of its emergence, the platform was not called SAP BTP yet. Also, while the other environments are supposed to run on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (also known as the multi-cloud foundation), the Neo environment runs in SAP data centers only.
The Neo environment lets you develop HTML5, Java, and SAP HANA extended application services (SAP HANA XS) applications. You can also use the UI Development Toolkit for HTML5 (SAPUI5) to develop rich user interfaces for modern web-based business applications.
NoteWe recommend that you migrate your existing scenarios from the Neo environment to the multi-cloud foundation.
Which Environment to Choose?
If you need further information on the benefits of the different environments and help on which environment to go for, look at the overview Runtimes, Environments and Programming Models.
