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's best practices for the given development use cases. This offering lets you create a running CI/CD pipeline for an SAP-specific use case in minutes.

The development team then uses the pipeline to qualify their changes, such as those made in SAP Business Application Studio. It offers a powerful and modern development environment tailored for the efficient development of business applications for the intelligent enterprise. Other development environments can be considered.

The changes get pushed into a Git-based source code repository, which triggers the execution of the associated pipeline via webhooks. Then, the automated tests within this pipeline get executed, and their outcome provides feedback to the developer on the quality of the change: is development done, or are further modifications required, as the tests failed?

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 over 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, for example for auditing reasons.

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

The enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+) can be an alternative to SAP Cloud Transport Management. This system 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, so only consider CTS+, if you are sure you will stick to MTA-based content use cases also in the future. If you are unsure, use SAP Cloud Transport Management.

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 a data proxy, such as for an integration with SAP Focused Run.

As outlined below, SAP Cloud ALM works with local observability and operations tools. SAP Cloud Logging service is an observability service that builds upon OpenSearch to store, visualize, and analyze application logs, metrics, and traces from SAP BTP Cloud Foundry, Kyma, Kubernetes and other runtime environments. For Cloud Foundry and Kyma, it offers an easy integration by providing predefined contents to investigate load, latency, and error rates of the observed applications based on their requests and correlate them with additional data.

To enable a reactive way of working, consider using the SAP Alert Notification service to subscribe to relevant events around your app – such as from third-party infrastructure providers or by coming up with custom alerts from your application. You can also get notified about the outcomes of pipeline runs and performed transports.

To reduce manual operation efforts and benefit from the automated execution of recommended actions (such as triggered from SAP Cloud ALM or by alerts for their remediation), look into the 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.

The Terraform provider for SAP BTP enables you to automate the provisioning, management, and configuration of resources on SAP BTP. By leveraging this provider, you can simplify and streamline the deployment and maintenance of SAP BTP services and applications. With this, it is an alternative to corresponding commands from SAP Automation Pilot service especially for infrastructure and provisioning management, based on a de-facto industry standard for infrastructure as code.

SAP BTP operations services can smoothly be integrated. For example, SAP Alert Notification service can route an SAP BTP event into the central health monitoring capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM. From there, you can jump to log information provided by SAP Cloud Logging for analyzing the root cause of reported issues. SAP Cloud ALM can also trigger and orchestrate automated operation flows executed on SAP BTP by the SAP Automation Pilot service. Open APIs are offered for an integration into third-party operation platforms.