SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the THE platform for integrating and extending your SAP landscape. One of the pillars of our multi-cloud strategy is to provide an open platform with the possibility to cross-consume services from different environments. This way customers can combine best-of-breed innovative technology with SAP’s business-centric services tailored for the Intelligent Enterprise journey.
One of the latest innovations that supports this initiative is an enhancement of the SAP Service Manager called SAP BTP Service Operator. This capability supports a new way of consuming SAP BTP services from a Kubernetes cluster, that is not managed by SAP. This means that your Kubernetes-native apps can access and use the services provisioned on SAP BTP. The SAP BTP Service Operator is based on the Kubernetes Operator Pattern, so you can manage your SAP BTP service instances and service bindings by using Kubernetes-native tools.
I’m sure you are wondering how this is possible and if you can try it out. Let’s go step-by-step.
The following diagram provides a high-level architecture overview of SAP BTP and your Kubernetes cluster:
To use this new feature, you’ll need to create a service instance and service binding for Service Manager. To do so, you can use either the cockpit or the CLI and select the newly available “service-operator-access” service plan.
You’ll need the access credentials generated by the service binding to deploy the SAP BTP Service Operator in your Kubernetes cluster. This is an example:
{
"clientid": "xxxxxxx",
"clientsecret": "xxxxxxx",
"url": "https://mysubaccount.authentication.eu10.hana.ondemand.com",
"xsappname": "b15166|service-manager!b1234",
"sm_url": "https://service-manager.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com"
}
Once that’s done, you can start consuming BTP services from your own Kubernetes cluster.
For a step-by-step guide and to see how to create and manage your service instances using SAP BTP Service Operator, go to https://github.com/SAP/sap-btp-service-operator.
If you are a Kubernetes enthusiast, you are probably already familiar with OperatorHub.io. I am proud to say that SAP BTP Service Operator is the first official SAP contribution and supports the industry move to using Operators. Just search for SAP and you’ll be able to download the service operator.
Wrap Up
SAP BTP Service Operator provides a new way to consume BTP services from your Kubernetes cluster. Why should you use it? Because it’s flexible, supports multi-tenancy development, it’s highly scalable and aligns with the latest open source standards and technology, to name just a few benefits. But don’t take my word for it. Test it out yourself using the SAP BTP trial and let us know your thoughts.
If you are looking for more information on SAP BTP Service Operator, check out:
