Sharing Service Instances supported/not supported? Contraditory documentation.

[jreimann]

Dear SAP,

we ran into the issue that we couldn't share service instances like described in the official CloudFoundry documentation.

I found the following two information which are contraditory:

• KBA #3069860 says that service instance sharing is not supported.
• In the SAP Help Portal it is written that service instance sharing is supported - but not for all services:
  

  

I'm wondering:

• if there is a list of services which support the service instance sharing feature?
• why I'm getting an "unauthorized" error when performing the following statement in my space? This has already been asked here

$ cf enable-feature-flag service_instance_sharing

Kind regards
Johannes

[sergei-u-niq]

According to CF docs, you must be the platform operator to enable this flag, which is SAP, rather than the customer owning the subaccount.

[jreimann]

Hi Sergei, you are absolutely right. I overlooked or misunderstood the relevant passage in the CF documentation.

Nevertheless, "Service Instance Sharing" seems to work at least for some services according to the SAP Help Portal.

It would be nice if there was an "official" answer from SAP as to whether they can provide a list of services that support instance sharing.

[jreimann · Accepted solution]

As we still wanted to shed some light on this matter, we filed an incident to SAP that the documentation is contraditory.

We got the answer that service instancing sharing is enabled by default. The note KBA #3069860 is not correct and will be fixed.

Regarding service instance sharing:
Each service offering has a flag which indicates if the service instance can be shared or not. Since there is no comprehensive list, you have to find it out on your own by using the cloud foundry API.

When you are in the cf10 region you have to call:

https://api.cf.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/v3/service_offerings

The token which you have to pass can be fetched like this (found the solution here😞

curl -v -XPOST -H"Application/json" -u "cf:" --data "username=<BTP user email>&password=<myPassword>&client_id=cf&grant_type=password&response_type=token" https://login.cf.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/oauth/token

As a response you get a list of all service offerings with their specifications. From that response I found out that only the following 2 services support instance sharing:

• PostgreSQL, hyperscaler option
• Service Manager

Kind regards
Johannes

[gregorw · Accepted solution]

Hi Johannes,

do you know the cf CLI curl option? Your request will be even easier:

cf curl /v3/service_offerings --output services.json

Best Regards
Gregor

[gregorw · Accepted solution]

I would suggest that you file an influencing request at SAP Business Technology Platform - Foundation and ask for an enhancement for the BTP Service Marketplace to include this information on the detail screen of a service.

[jreimann · Accepted solution]

Hi Gregor,

I created an influencing request: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/291425

Best Regards
Johannes