Although there are many offerings out there in the market, DevOps on SAP BTP brings a lot of benefits, especially for SAP-centric customers and SAP-specific scenarios. Those benefits will be further explained in this lesson.
Business Scenario
Rotating Banana does not bring much experience for agile development yet, but would like to gain first experience with DevOps as part of its cloud transformation. For this, a low entry barrier will help to make first steps.
As the company's focus will lie on SAP-specific scenarios, SAP BTP sounds like a natural fit.
Especially, as Rotating Banana- a long-year 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
- Respects existing operations processes
- Highly integrated
Let’s explore each one in detail.
Low Entry Barrier
DevOps with SAP BTP offers an easy start with a very low entry barrier, via an opinionated approach focused especially at SAP-centric scenarios and use cases, based on SAP best practices. This is enabled by the SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service, as introduced in the previous lesson.
This low-entry offering allows you to quickly experience the benefits the DevOps approach does bring in general and to build up 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 will have gained more insights.
This is especially helpful as part of a cloud transformation, where you want to benefit from DevOps, but address it as part of an overall change process.
Also, customers that favor an SAP-recommended, opinionated approach, with direct support from SAP also for their DevOps processes for their SAP-centric development find an excellent solution in this offering.
If you should already have expertise and infrastructure in place around DevOps, SAP provides best practices about how to apply these also for your SAP scenarios via project 'Piper', also introduced in the previous lesson.
Respects Existing Operations Processes
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 infrastructure you have already created. Instead, you can extend existing processes, so that they cover on-premise, cloud-centric and hybrid scenarios from SAP.
Think of processes being offered from SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Focused Run, and SAP Solution Manager around change management, monitoring, and supportability.
By using DevOps with SAP BTP, you can establish both enterprise-ready and agile approach for your SAP development scenarios
If you use third-party operations platforms and frameworks, use open APIs of the SAP BTP DevOps services for a smooth integration.
Highly Integrated
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 provided pipeline templates allow you to easily configure an automated hand-over of qualified changes into transport and existing change management processes out of the box. Those pipelines can be handled directly out of SAP's integrated development environment for more than one purpose.
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.
Why to Apply DevOps With SAP BTP?
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 is focusing especially 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).
Business Scenario
Rotating Banana has invested in change management processes, but has been using them so far for the propagation of their on-premise development.
You, as CTO, expect to use SAP BTP development in parallel to on-premise development for a longer period as part of your transition. So, the option to integrate DevOps smoothly into existing operations processes sounds very tempting. This would also ease the transition for your existing teams.
SAP BTP also makes it easier for you to implement DevOps approaches to software development, especially when releasing SAP-specific applications.
This makes SAP BTP the platform of choice for Rotating Banana, given the company's pre-existing operations and ambitions for the future.
Summary
You now can describe why SAP BTP is an excellent choice for applying DevOps approaches to products that exist within the SAP software environment.
Further Reading
Overview of SAP's strategic operations platforms: Application Lifecycle Management (sap.com)