Illustrating the Architecture of SAP BTP

You can deploy applications in different regions. Each region represents a geographical location (for example, Europe, US East) where applications, data, or services are hosted. A region is chosen at the subaccount level. For each subaccount, you select exactly one region. The selection of a region is dependent on many factors: for example, application performance (response time, latency) can be optimized by selecting a region close to the user. The global account itself is also running in a region.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure layer of a region is either provided by SAP or by one of SAP's Instrastructure as a Service (IaaS) partners Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Alibaba Cloud.

Environments

Environments constitute the actual platform as a service offering of SAP BTP that allows for the development and administration of business applications. Each environment comes equipped with the tools, technologies, and runtimes that you need to build applications.

Services

Services enable, facilitate, or accelerate the development of business applications and other platform services on SAP BTP. You find all available services in the SAP Discovery Center.

Data

Your business and application data is managed through services like the SAP HANA Cloud service or the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud service.

Applications

The business applications that you deploy in a region build on top of, and make use of, the layers underneath.

Each subaccount is associated with a region, which is the physical location where applications, data, or services are hosted. The specific region is relevant when you deploy applications and access the SAP BTP cockpit using the corresponding cockpit URL. The region assigned to your subaccount doesn't have to be directly related to your location. You could be located in the United States, for example, but operate your subaccount in Europe.

The entitlements and quotas that have been purchased for a global account have to be assigned to the individual subaccounts.

Note

A quota represents the numeric quantity that defines the maximum allowed consumption of a resource. In other words, how much of a service plan you're entitled to use.

A service plan is the representation of the costs and benefits for a given variant of a particular service. For instance, a database may be configured with various "T-shirt sizes", each of which is a different service plan.

The terms global accounts and subaccounts and their meaning in scope of SAP BTP are not referring to user accounts or user management.

Environments constitute the actual Platform as a Service offering of SAP BTP that allows for the development and administration of business applications. Environments are anchored in SAP BTP on the subaccount level.

Each environment comes equipped with specific tools, technologies, and runtimes that you need to build applications. So a multi-environment subaccount is your single address to host a variety of applications and offer diverse development options. One advantage of using different environments in one subaccount is that you only need to manage users, authorizations, and entitlements once per subaccount, and thus, grant more flexibility to your developers.

The figure Entity Relationships Between Global Account, Directory, and Subaccounts depicts the relationship between a global account, its directories, subaccounts, environments, regions, entitlements, and quotas for feature set B.

A subaccount is specified for the environment Neo or for the environment Multi-Environment (KYMA, ABAP, and Cloud Foundry environment).

Note

The Neo environment of SAP BTP was the first version of the SAP BTP available on the market after the product launch.

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.

SAP is focusing on the multi-environment account model with feature set B.

Read more: https://help.sap.com/viewer/65de2977205c403bbc107264b8eccf4b/Cloud/en-US/6a2c1ab5a31b4ed9a2ce17a5329e1dd8.html

Best practices: https://help.sap.com/doc/463beee05122412db150e08e6f444b7e/Cloud/en-US/Planning_LM.pdf