Based on the account model identified in the previous lesson, you should also decide the best delivery approach for your project on SAP BTP. This mainly depends on finding the right mix between the desired level of agility and the required level of control. This will impact how you propagate your changes towards your production sub-account. Your organization's existing change management boundary conditions might already predate the mix.
Delivery Options
Highly regulated markets typically demand highly controlled change management processes. This is true for both on-premise and cloud development, as both contribute to a business-critical application.
In such a case, you can benefit from SAP's strategic operations platforms' change and deployment management capabilities, such as SAP Cloud ALM. They allow orchestrating and synchronizing the propagation of changes in hybrid scenarios. Conversely, you might have cloud-native projects where no change management is needed. You would instead benefit from the highly agile approach of Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment. With this, you can let the pipeline perform a direct delivery or deployment of your changes that are qualified by automated test cases towards production.
For other projects, you might have more freedom to choose the approach best suited to you individually.
Business Scenario
As the release manager of Rotating Banana, you already use SAP Solution Manager's Change Request Management (ChaRM) for your on-premise and private cloud changes. Now, you would like the option for a similar level of control when handling critical cloud changes - ideally, in the same system for hybrid changes.
Still, you want to follow SAP's strategic direction for its operations platforms. According to this, SAP Cloud ALM will be the long-term go-to solution for existing SAP Solution Manager customers. Therefore, you would like to start to gain experience with first scenarios on SAP Cloud ALM, to prepare the transition.
And for smaller projects without interdependencies, your development teams would like to benefit from higher agility.
Available Delivery Options on SAP BTP
The following section outlines the delivery approaches supported on SAP BTP, based on your required levels of agility and control.
1. Fast Path to CI/CD Pipelines Recommended by SAP
- Benefits from automated build/test/deploy pipelines.
- Quick results with a simple start, low entry barrier, and solid delivery where no change management is required.
- Enabled by SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service (and project 'Piper').
2. Additional Control with Transport Management
- Allows agility with control in combination with CI/CD.
- Automatically hand over release candidates from the pipeline into transport management.
- Enabled by SAP Cloud Transport Management service (and CTS+).
- Promotes more efficient audits, separation of concerns, allows to regain control of your changes centrally.
You conceptually differentiate between two landscapes:
- Development Landscape:- The development landscape is based on continuous integration principles, managed and owned by the DevOps team to verify single developer changes, and is typically fully automated.
- Delivery Landscape:- is based on strict Transport Management rules (policies, schedules) and managed by your operations team to verify release candidate versions; this is typically done with manual confirmation (such as by a delivery manager).
3. Centralized Control with Change Management
- Integrate transports into a holistic change management process.
- It allows orchestrating and synchronizing changes from different environments that contribute to one hybrid business scenario, on-premise and cloud.
- Enabled by SAP's strategic operations platforms - for example, with change and deployment management capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM or Change Request Management (ChaRM) / Quality Gate Management (QGM) of SAP Solution Manager.
- Alternatively, you can use open APIs to orchestrate the propagation of cloud transports from a third-party solution for change management.
Note
The above figure shows SAP Cloud ALM for change management. Alternatively, you could also use Change and Request Management (ChaRM) or Quality Gate Management (QGM) from SAP Solution Manager - or third-party solutions, that orchestrate SAP Cloud Transport Management service via open APIs.Delivery Options
If the boundary conditions for control and agility are different, you can have different delivery approaches for various projects and products in parallel.
You can also start simple and evolve if the need for additional control arises later.
Still, it might also be beneficial to apply one single approach for all projects so that they behave the same - where the project with the highest need for control would define the best-fitting approach.
The options enabling those three levels of control will now be described in more detail in the upcoming lessons.
Business Scenario
As release manager at Rotating Banana, you manage your software applications using ChaRM within SAP Solution Manager. You are satisfied with ChaRM's performance and decide for the time being to use it to implement centralized control with change management for your business-critical hybrid applications, too.
For cloud-centric scenarios, you should follow SAP's strategic guidance and gain firsthand experience with SAP Cloud ALM's change management capabilities – in order to prepare also the move of your hybrid and on-premise/private cloud scenarios to SAP Cloud ALM.
You allow your development teams to start with CI/CD for smaller projects without interdependencies. When these projects reach a level of business criticality, a controlled handover into transport and change management shall be considered
Summary
You can now name available delivery options on SAP BTP for production and know how to identify your best-fitting delivery approach based on your boundary conditions for agility and control.
Further Reading
- Achieve Continuous Integration and Delivery using DevOps services in SAP Cloud Platform | SAP Blogs
- Integration between SAP Cloud ALM and Cloud Transport Management is now available | SAP Blogs
- How to use the integration of SAP Cloud Platform Transport Management into SAP Solution Manager Change Request Management and Quality Gate Management | SAP Blogs