Introducing SAP BTP Services for DevOps

DevOps with SAP BTP includes SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service, a 'Pipeline-as-a-Service' offering for CI/CD, with templates for SAP-specific use cases. These templates reflect SAP best practices for the given development use cases. This offering allows you to come up with a running CI/CD pipeline for an SAP-specific use case in minutes.

The pipeline is then used by the development team to qualify their changes, such as being made in SAP Business Application Studio. It offers a powerful and modern development environment, tailored for efficient development of business applications for the intelligent enterprise. Optionally, you could also consider other development environments.

The changes get pushed into a Git-based source code repository, which triggers the execution of the associated pipeline via webhooks. The automated tests that are comprised in this pipeline then get executed and their outcome provide feedback to the developer on the quality of the change - is development done or are further changes required, as the tests did not succeed.

The pipelines also allow an optional automated hand-over of qualified release candidates into transport management. This enables you to apply a standardized, enterprise-ready change management process, with additional control towards your production environment. For example, you can define who can come up and handle changes in which sub-account, which enables you to enforce company policies. You also get a central log file of your changes, such as for auditing reasons.

The recommended option for transport management is the SAP Cloud Transport Management service, as it covers more and more application-specific content types besides development content. For example, think of portal sites from SAP Build Work Zone or integration flows of SAP Integration Suite.

Alternative to SAP Cloud Transport Management is the usage of the enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+). This is part of ABAP on-premise servers and can cover only content in the format of Multi-target Application (MTA) archives. There are no plans to extend the content coverage of CTS+ beyond this format.

For additional control, you can integrate transport into change management processes - running on SAP Cloud ALM or existing processes powered by SAP Focused Run/SAP Solution Manager. These allow you to synchronize the propagation of cloud changes with on-premise changes, for hybrid scenarios.

SAP Cloud ALM is SAP BTP’s central operations platform. Optionally, you can use SAP Cloud ALM as data proxy, such as for integration with SAP Focused Run.

SAP Cloud ALM works together with local observability and operations tools, as outlined below.

To enable a reactive way of working, consider using SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP to subscribe to relevant events around your app - be it from used SAP BTP services, from the infrastructure providers or with custom alerts from your application. Also, you can get notified about outcomes of pipeline runs and performed transports. You can then consume these alerts via your channel of choice.

To reduce manual operation efforts and to benefit from the automated execution of recommended actions (such as triggered from SAP Cloud ALM or by alerts), These alerts can then automatically trigger recommended actions - such as for alert remediation, executed by look into SAP Automation Pilot service. It brings a low-code and no-code automation engine, powered by catalogs of automated actions for daily operation tasks and corrective activities, allowing your DevOps teams to increase the automation level for running your applications on SAP BTP.

As mentioned above, SAP BTP operations services can smoothly be integrated - for example, alerts from SAP BTP can easily get routed by SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP into health monitoring capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM that then trigger and orchestrate automated operation flows executed on SAP BTP, by SAP Automation Pilot service. For third-party operation platforms, open APIs are offered for integration.