Explaining Why to Apply DevOps With SAP BTP

Rotating Banana has yet to bring much experience in agile development, but it would like to gain firsthand experience with DevOps as part of its cloud transformation. A low entry barrier will help it take the first steps.

As the company focuses on SAP-specific scenarios, SAP BTP sounds like a natural fit. Rotating Banana—a long-time SAP customer—would like to stick to established SAP operations processes and extend them with cloud aspects where possible.

The key benefits of DevOps with SAP BTP are:

• Easy start and very low entry barrier, especially for SAP-specific use cases
• Respect existing operations processes
• Highly integrated

Let’s explore each one in detail.

DevOps with SAP BTP offers an easy start with a low entry barrier. Based on SAP best practices, its opinionated approach focuses especially on SAP-centric scenarios and use cases. As introduced in the previous lesson, the SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service enables this.

This low-entry offering allows you to experience the benefits the DevOps approach brings in general quickly and to build up your own experience - without spending too much effort to find the best approach right from the start, where there is a high probability that it will have to be adapted later anyway, as soon as your teams have gained more insights.

This is especially helpful during a cloud transformation, where you want to benefit from DevOps but address it as part of an overall change process.

Also, customers who favor an SAP-recommended, opinionated approach, with direct support from SAP for their DevOps processes and SAP-centric development, find an excellent solution in this offering.​

Suppose you should already have expertise and infrastructure in place around DevOps. In that case, consider project 'Piper', also introduced in the previous lesson.

DevOps with SAP BTP works in partnership with pre-existing processes and systems. As a result, you can avoid creating parallel processes that clash with the infrastructure you have already made. Instead, you can extend existing processes to cover on-premise, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid scenarios from SAP.

Think of processes offered by SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Focused Run, and SAP Solution Manager related to change management, monitoring, and supportability.

Using DevOps with SAP BTP, you can establish enterprise-ready and agile approaches for your SAP development scenarios.

If you use third-party operations platforms and frameworks, use open APIs of the SAP BTP DevOps services for smooth integration.

SAP recommends a standard setup for agile development on SAP BTP with DevOps - covering the complete lifecycle from development to operations. This is provided by several cloud services that work together seamlessly. For example, the Continuous Integration pipeline templates allow you to easily configure an automated handover of qualified changes into transport and existing change management processes. Those pipelines can be handled directly from SAP's integrated development environment (IDE) for multiple purposes.

To monitor your development processes, ensure that notifications from SAP BTP are switched on concerning your latest pipeline runs or the transports that have most recently occurred into specific sub-accounts. These notifications can be pushed to your development team through whichever channel is most relevant. These might include chat apps, e-mail, or strategic operations platforms.

Overall, you benefit from an approach that is SAP-centric on several levels and highly integrated along the complete lifecycle:

• It offers a very low entry barrier, based on SAP best practices.
• It focuses primarily on SAP-centric use cases, such as part of your transition towards the cloud around SAP S/4HANA.
• And it does respect existing operations processes (such as on SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager).

Rotating Banana has invested in change management processes but has only been using them to propagate its on-premise and private cloud development.

As CTO, you expect to use SAP BTP development in parallel with on-premise and private cloud development for a more extended period as part of your transition. So, integrating DevOps smoothly into existing operations processes sounds very tempting. This would also ease the transition for your existing teams. Still, those existing processes should be transitioned to SAP Cloud ALM, following SAP’s strategic direction and guidance.

SAP BTP also makes it easier for you to implement DevOps approaches to software development, especially when releasing SAP-specific applications.

Given Rotating Banana's preexisting operations and future ambitions, SAP BTP is the platform of choice.

You can now describe why SAP BTP is an excellent choice for applying DevOps approaches to products within the SAP software environment.

Overview of SAP's strategic operations platforms: Application Lifecycle Management (sap.com)