The Services Types in SAP BTP
A lot of capabilities from SAP BTP are delivered as services. Some of the services are always for free, while other ones need to get paid for additionally. Before you can utilize a service, you need to subscribe to it or create an instance of your selected service. Before doing that, you need to be familiar with the service plans which are available for this service to select the right one for your scenario. You can get more information about the existing service plans of a service in the SAP Discovery Center or the documentation on the SAP Help Portal. We can differentiate between two types of services: There are lots of services available and you can use them for several use cases. Services can be instantiated or subscribed.
- Instance
- A service instance is a set of capabilities which get consumed via API's and/or bindings. Some services also require an additional environment like Cloud Foundry or Kyma to work properly. Depending on the service, you can also utilize a graphical application, in this case, definitely an additional environment is required because service instances don't have their own runtime built in.
- Subscription
- A service subscription is standalone and runs without the need of an additional runtime environment or any other service. These services mostly come with an application you can open and use. You can utilize the capabilities of this application for your scenarios.
Example Use of Services on SAP BTP
In the figure, Example Use of Services on SAP BTP, you see a potential use case for some services.
Your developers have the task to develop a SAPUI5 application with SAP Cloud Application Programming Model. This application should be hosted on the SAP BTP.
The developers decide to use the SAP Business Application Studio as the IDE. For the Continuous Integration and Delivery pipeline, they use the Continuous Integration & Delivery service of SAP BTP. The application gets deployed inside the Cloud Foundry Environment of the SAP BTP. The developers use the SAP HANA Cloud to store data of the application (database as a service).
While you want the operation and productive use of the application to ensure security through authorization management, you want to write logs and handle load automatically.
For the authorization, your developers use the Authorization and Trust Management service. For the logs, they can connect the application to the Application Logging Service. For handling loads dynamically, your developers can create an instance of the Application Autoscaler, configure it with scaling rules, and bind it to the application.
In addition to the use case from this scenario, there are more potential use cases and even more services that could be used.
