Understanding Service Bindings

Services enable, facilitate, or accelerate the development of business applications on SAP BTP by providing functionalities that apps typically don’t implement themselves, such as databases, or authentication.

In the Cloud Foundry environment, you can create service instances through the SAP BTP cockpit, and then bind these instances to your applications. This way the application consumes the functionality offered by the service.

Services offered by SAP

Services offered by SAP are available in the Service Marketplace in SAP BTP cockpit where you can create a service instance or subscription on-demand. Each service instance represents a single instantiation of a service running on SAP BTP. You create service instances using specific service plans.

Examples: Application Autoscaler, Application Logging Service

You can access and manage services through the following cockpit pages:

• Service Marketplace: provides an overview of all services available for consumption in your subaccount

• Instances and Subscriptions: displays lists of created service and environment instances, as well as subscriptions

For more information, see View and Manage Services from the Service Marketplace | SAP Help Portal.

User-provided services

The Cloud Foundry environment supports user-provided services, which are developed and maintained by the user. These services aren’t available in the Service Marketplace. Once you create a user-provided service instance, it behaves the same way as the service instances in the marketplace.

For your application to consume services, you need to deliver service credentials to the app. You can do that by:

• Using service keys to generate credentials for direct communication with a service instance.

• Binding service instances to your application to automatically deliver credentials (covered in this tutorial)

What is a service key?

Service keys generate credentials for manually configuring consumers of services from the marketplace. After you configure them for your service, local clients, apps in other spaces, or entities outside your deployment can access your service with these keys.

What is a service binding?

Service binding connects a service instance to your application. Binding a service instance to your application triggers credentials to be provisioned for the service instance and delivered to the app runtime.

On the Service Bindings page, you bind an application to a service using the Bind Service Instance wizard. You can either:

• Bind an existing service instance.

• Create a new service instance and bind it.

Once a service is bound to an application, you can choose the View Dashboard button in the Actions column to open the corresponding service dashboard and view more details about the service.

Note: Not all services have a dashboard.

To view the credentials of the service binding, select it from the list. The credentials appear on the right-hand side of the screen, below the Service Binding Details.

Note: Space Supporters don’t have access to the service binding credentials.

When you no longer need a connection between your application and a service, delete the binding between them.

On the Service Bindings page:

1. Choose the Delete button in the Actions column.

   

2. Choose Delete to confirm the action.

   

   Note: Only the binding between the application and service is deleted. Both the application and the service instance aren’t deleted.