DevOps for SAP PI/PO developers

DevOps is nothing new but is it in the SAP community.

Over the last couple of month, I have been introduced to the concepts of DevOps from different sides. According to Wikipedia DevOps was enters in 2008 around the Agile Infrastructure. To make it easier for the developer to move from code to release and to monitor.

The developers of my test tool are using it to some extent. We are just creating builds and do not run our code live yet. But there is room for improvement I was at training on Apigee where it was almost implicit that you just used Jenkins (or some another CI tool like Bamboo) to help in the process. The last place I hear about it was the Tech conference GotoCPH where it seems that everybody else was already doing it. If not moving to serverless.

As an SAP developer, it’s something that I don’t see it being a lot of places. Is it out there?

So in my book DevOps it having the continuous delivery process that allowed development at a rapid pace. This is something we see from the startup world, where all the companies able to deliver new features fast and test if they improve growth. So you actually able to deploy code that is only run for all subset of your views, and verify if it would work.

So what is DevOps:

I am probably not the best person to explain this, but my understanding of this is the following.

The process starts with a developer that commits a code change to the repository, for example – special branch in Git. Some job would identify that change, fetch new state and then it would start building the code from scratch and running build-time tests. If the build is successful and tests were passed, the new build will be deployed to a test server, and then CI tool will run acceptance tests on it. Then the user/QA could do some manual tests and verify that the new build works. Once everything is checked the build will be moved to production using the same CI tool. In some cases, the code would just run for a subset of the uses to verify that it has the expected result.  You can then monitor and support the process in some integrated way.

So it is about creating tests that developers can run locally and centrally to verify everything is nothing will break.

If we take a look at the SAP world, it’s entirely different. At least the on-premise world. It seems like SAP Cloud applications have been created in this way. Systems have here been this signed to a waterfall approach, where you’re just delivering code on a different release cycle. Maybe once a month or when a project is finished.

There is probably way implement some code that would help on your ABAP system to test and deliver the changes. There are probably some ABAP tools for creating the test case and verify the results both on development and test. There may be some practices around it that would allow users to implement some form of a DevOps in an SAP world.

If we look at an SAP PI/PO, then I don’t think it’s any different. You have your three system landscape with CTS+ transports. You could set up some tests with self, but it is time-consuming to do it.

My SAP PI/PO IRT tool has some capabilities in that direction. It can run a set of automated test cases and do a good part of the testing. We have not integrated with system releases to verify that the changed functions still work. Maybe we get a chance to work on it in the future if that is where customers are moving.

Are you doing DevOps in your SAP Landscape?