Identifying the right Delivery Approach for you

Highly regulated markets normally demand change management processes with a high level of control. This is true for both on-premise and cloud development, as long as both parts contribute to a business-critical application.

In such a case, you can benefit from change and deployment management capabilities of SAP's strategic operations platforms, such as SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager. They allow to orchestrate and synchronize the propagation of changes in hybrid scenarios.

On the other side of the spectrum, you might have cloud-native projects where no change management is needed. There, you might rather want to 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 got qualified by automated test cases towards production.

And for other projects, you might have more freedom to choose the individually best fitting approach.

As release manager of Rotating Banana, you have Change Request Management (ChaRM) of SAP Solution Manager already in use for your on-premise changes and are fine with it. Now, you would like to get 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.

And for smaller projects without interdependencies, your development teams would like to benefit from higher agility.

The following section outline the delivery approaches supported on SAP BTP, based on your required levels of agility and control.

• Benefits from automated build/test/deploy pipelines.
• Quick results with simple start, low entry barrier and with solid delivery where no change management is required.
• Enabled by SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service (and project 'Piper').

• Allows to combine agility with control in combination with CI/CD.
• Automatically hand-over release candidates from pipeline into transport management.
• Enabled by SAP Cloud Transport Management service (and CTS+).
• Promotes more efficient audits, separation of concerns, allows to centrally regain control of your changes.

You conceptually differentiate between two landscapes:

• Development landscape, based on Continuous Integration principles, managed and owned by the DevOps team, with the goal to verify single developer changes, and typically fully automated.
• Delivery landscape, based on strict Transport Management rules (policies, schedules) and managed by your operations team, with the goal to verify release candidate versions; typically done with manual confirmation (such as by a delivery manager).

• Integrate transports into a holistic change management process.
• Allows to orchestrate and synchronize changes from different environments that contribute to one hybrid business scenario, on-premise + 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.

You can have different delivery approaches for different projects and products in parallel - in case they have different boundary conditions for control and agility. 

You can also start simple and evolve by time, if the need for additional control will come up later. 

Still, it might also be beneficial to apply one single approach for all projects, so that all do 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.

As release manager at Rotating Banana you are using ChaRM within SAP Solution Manager to manage your software applications. You are satisfied with ChaRM's performance and decide to use it to implement centralized control with change management for your business critical hybrid applications, too.

For cloud-centric scenarios, you want to follow SAP's strategic guidance and want to build up first experience with change management capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM. 

For smaller projects without interdependencies, you allow your development teams to start with CI/CD. A controlled hand-over into transport and change management shall be considered, as soon as these projects cross a certain level of business criticality.

You now can name available delivery options on SAP BTP towards production and know how to identify your best-fitting delivery approach, based on your boundary conditions for agility and control.

• 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