The BTP Account Hierarchy
Every SAP BTP setup follows the same ladder: global account, directories, subaccounts, spaces. If this structure clicks early, everything else — deployments, entitlements, service bindings — becomes much easier.
Think of it as nested containers. Each level isolates configuration, users, and quotas from the others.
Global Accounts and Directories
The global account is the top of the ladder. It holds your contracts, overall quotas, and the directories and subaccounts beneath it. You usually have one per company or per major initiative.
Directories are optional folders between the global account and subaccounts. They exist to group subaccounts by region, purpose, or team — for example, a "Development" directory and a "Production" directory.
You do not have to use directories. Many small setups put subaccounts directly under the global account, and that works fine.
Subaccounts: The Workhorse
A subaccount is where real work happens. It defines a region, an environment (Cloud Foundry or Kyma), and a set of service entitlements. Apps deploy into subaccounts, and users get roles per subaccount.
Common practice: one subaccount per landscape stage. Say you need separate dev, QA, and prod environments for a Fiori app — three subaccounts keeps their services and configurations cleanly apart.
A subaccount is the unit of isolation: region, environment, entitlements, and user roles all live at this level.
Spaces: Slicing a Subaccount
Inside a Cloud Foundry subaccount, spaces divide things further. They are lightweight — a way to separate apps and service instances within the same subaccount.
Typical setup: a dev space for active development and a qa space for testing, both inside the same "Development" subaccount. Each space gets its own memory quota so one team's runaway app does not starve the other.
Spaces are cheap to create and delete. Use them freely for feature branches, demos, or experiments.
Entitlements: Your Shopping List
Entitlements decide which services a subaccount is allowed to use, and how much of each. They are assigned from the global account's quota pool down to directories and subaccounts.
To add a service to a subaccount:
- Open the subaccount, go to Entitlements → Configure Entitlements.
- Click Add Service Plans, pick the service and plan (for example, SAP HANA Cloud, standard).
- Save. The service now appears when you create service instances in that subaccount.
If a service is missing from your instance creation screen, it is almost always an entitlement problem — check here first.
No entitlement, no instance. This check fixes nine out of ten "service not available" confusions.
Putting It Together
A sane starting layout looks like this: global account → directory "non-prod" → subaccount "dev" (region: your nearest) → spaces "dev" and "qa". Entitlements flow down from the global account to each subaccount.
Start simple, add directories and subaccounts only when you feel real pain from not having them. Over-structuring early just creates navigation overhead.
Questions? Drop them in the comments.