Terraform provider for SAP BTP now available for non-productive use

[Rui-Nogueira]

With the increasing adoption of the SAP Business Technology Platform many of our SAP customers asked for ways to automate the setup of their SAP BTP accounts.

So far, they have different options:

• Use the documented BTP APIs


• Use the btp CLI (command line interface) to automate single steps in the management of an SAP BTP account and integrate them in scripts to e.g., embed them into their CI/CD pipelines.


• Use the SAP Automation Pilot that is available in various regions of SAP BTP.


• Use the community-driven open-source project btp-setup-automator. It combines multiple command line interfaces within a container image and enables you to define complex SAP BTP use cases within a JSON configuration file [see my blog post from last year].

Although you can already do a lot with the options mentioned above, several customers asked for getting support for Terraform. Started by Hashicorp in 2014 as an open-source initiative for infrastructure-as-code, Terraform has become a broadly used standard in the IT industry.

And as you can see in some blog posts (e.g., [ref1, ref2] from our SAP colleague mauriciolauffer) there is quite some interest in using Terraform in SAP BTP today.

Scope of Terraform provider for SAP BTP, v0.1.0

To address our customer’s demand SAP provides today the first release v0.1.0-beta1 of the Terraform provider for SAP BTP with a limited scope covering the following capabilities:

• Create, read, and delete sub accounts


• Create, read, and delete directories


• Assign, read, and delete labels (directories, sub accounts)


• Create, read, and delete roles


• Create, read, and delete role collections


• Assign, read, and delete assignment of users to role collections


• Create, read, and delete service entitlements


• Assign custom identity providers (global account and sub account)

You will see as well the Terraform provider for SAP BTP in the Terraform registry:

 

As the release number indicates the Terraform provider for SAP BTP certainly has some rough edges, so we do not recommend a productive usage of this version. Our clear goal for this version is to collect your feedback.

Note:

Please keep in mind that Terraform persists the state of the scripts on the machine that is executing them. That state can contain sensitive data. Please keep that in mind and follow the recommendations for Terraform.

First sample code available: Automate SAP BTP withTerraform

In case you are not familiar so far with Terraform, there is a new GitHub repository available with samples and best practices. You find it at https://github.com/SAP-samples/btp-terraform-samples.

Try it out and get used to Terraform and how you can use the Terraform provider for SAP BTP in real-life use cases.

Extending the scope in the next months

As mentioned before, within the next months, we want to collect feedback from our customers and partners to evaluate v0.1.0 and to ensure that the capabilities provided by the Terraform provider for SAP BTP are covering the customers/partners requirements and fit to their needs.

We target a (roughly) monthly release update. Once we see that the Terraform provider for SAP BTP is ready for productive use, we will provide a v1.0.0 release. Until that point in time, we will continuously evolve the v0.x.x version.

Engage and provide feedback!

To allow a focused discussion and to keep track of raised issues, we ask you to use the GitHub repository for the Terraform provider for SAP BTP.

As usual you can create a bug report and raise a feature requests in the issues section of the GitHub repository.

In addition, you can start or join a discussion within the GitHub repository and exchange your ideas with other developers and the team behind the Terraform provider for SAP BTP.

We are eager to provide you with a great way to connect to SAP BTP via Terraform. Looking forward to all your input.

Best,
Rui for the team behind the Terraform provider for SAP BTP