Monday morning thoughts: more on ABAP in the cloud

In this post, following my previous post on the subject, I think a bit more about the SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment, inspired by the conversations around the subject at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas last week. 

Last month, Harald Kuck published a post “SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment” which many of us had been eagerly anticipating. The post has already had around 24K views and over 60 likes, which says something for the popularity of the subject matter. I followed up with a Monday morning thoughts post “ABAP in the cloud” a few days later.

Last week at SAP TechEd, Bernd Leukert included references to this new ABAP environment in his keynote, which was wonderful to hear. (There were a lot of other great things in the keynote, such as SAP Cloud Platform Functions, but that’s a subject for another time). And so the conversations that started last month were reinvigorated, which is always a good thing. There’s a lot of different opinions out there, so I thought in this posts I’d share some of my own thinking on the subject.

To set the scene, though, I first wanted to share a couple of tweets from our Developer Garage at SAP TechEd last week*. One of the areas offered workstations and a number of tutorial missions for attendees to come and work through (and win prizes, hurray!).

*The Developer Garage will of course also be at SAP TechEd in Barcelona later this month!

This year there are four missions:

• SAP Cloud Platform (Application Programming Model)
• SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment
• S/4HANA
• SAP Cloud Platform Portal

The developer garage with tutorial missions in full swing at SAP TechEd Las Vegas last week, from a tweet by @sapdevs

Throughout most of the week, not surprisingly, the SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment mission was leading the pack, in terms of number of tutorials completed. There is huge interest in the offering! In a fun bit of technology rivalry, however, at one stage the SAP Cloud Platform (Application Programming Model) took the lead, as you can see from this tweet:

“At #SAPTechEd the application programming model for @sapcp tutorials at the @SAPdevs garage are in the lead – yas!” — @qmacro

But in the end, the sheer weight of enthusiasm and desire to get a first hands-on experience meant that the SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment mission ended up on top, as you can see from this tweet from Andre Fischer (the total number of tutorials completed finished a little bit over 2000 by the time SAP TechEd finished last week):

“#abap in front again. 30 minutes to go” — @anfisc

Although I’m a huge fan of the new Application Programming Model (which also drew great interest last week), I have to say that the new SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment was a worthy winner in this case.

ABAP PaaS  

I’m going to refer to the SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment in the rest of this post unofficially as “ABAP PaaS”, as that’s what others are calling it too. In fact, that’s already sparked some interesting conversation, as some folks are not convinced that the moniker is appropriate.

I remember the first release of Google’s App Engine, quite a few years ago now. What that offered at the outset was a cloud based runtime for Python based apps. There was a particular deployment process, and you had to think in a certain way if you wanted to take advantage of the features offered, especially when it came to using facilities such as the persistence layer or message queues. This was fine, and sort of part of the point of the “platform” part of PaaS – the platform offered certain features and required you to think in certain ways and employ certain approaches.

To me, ABAP PaaS is similar, in that it allows me to write in a language with which I’m familiar, take advantage of certain platform level features — such as a HANA-backed persistence layer — and also causes me to think in a particular way (more on this shortly). Like App Engine, I don’t have to worry about the maintenance, operation or upkeep of the ABAP platform – it just happens. New features are rolled out and available to me as they appear. I don’t have to concern myself with differing releases of differing target runtimes – unlike in the on-prem world.

The ABAP language

ABAP appeared on the scene in the late 1980’s, and I have fond memories of trying early versions of this new “report writing” language, as an alternative to the 370 assembly language in which R/2 was written by the SAP developers themselves, but which was also used by customers who needed extensions and custom reports.

The language has grown over the decades, taking on significant new features along the way (such as support for SQL and object orientation) and today enjoying rather modern features, not only as part of the language itself but also within the layers of the greater ABAP environment as a whole – I’m thinking of Core Data Services (CDS), for example. The article “ABAP and the Cloud” by Karl Kessler gives a good overview of what today’s ABAP looks like.

And this is something that I think about a lot, in the context of the modernisation of ABAP as we move to the cloud. Some language features are being deprecated, perhaps those that should have been deprecated a long time ago if it hadn’t been for the requirement for backward compatibility – again, on-prem legacy challenges which disappear in the ABAP PaaS context.

The ABAP environment

But ABAP in general, and ABAP in the cloud in particular, is more than just a language. It’s a whole set of building blocks that together present a rich set of features for building business apps – whether they’re new apps or extensions to existing functionality. Some of the building blocks are themselves written in ABAP (rather than at kernel level). One notable example that comes to mind immediately is the layer supporting the development of HTTP based services in general, and supporting the development of OData services in particular. That layer itself is written in ABAP.

So I find it more useful to think about the “ABAP environment” rather than the “ABAP language”. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. And with the advent of excellent initiatives from the community (abapGit from Lars Hvam immediately comes to mind) it’s becoming even greater.

When we think of the ABAP language itself, there is sometimes the objection that it’s proprietary. But for me, that’s not the point. Open sourcing the language would be one thing, but is it really what we should be focusing on right now? As I’ve already mentioned, ABAP is more than a language. Moreover, there are other environments with their own language. An example that immediately comes to mind is Apex, a language specific to Salesforce for developing flow and transaction control in conjunction with calls to various APIs. And that’s OK too.

ABAP PaaS’s focus

That mention of APIs brings me to the primary focus for ABAP PaaS. There are many reasons why I think ABAP PaaS is important.

One is that we have a rich intellectual ocean of knowledge and experience in ABAP, amongst customers, partners and of course developers inside SAP too. To ignore that would be to effectively discard a vast skill base as we move to a cloud-first solutions paradigm.

I do think that developers should master more than one language, but not everyone agrees with me, and that’s OK. Moreover, considering that ABAP is more than just a language, as I’ve mentioned, there’s plenty of scope for individuals to focus on an ABAP flavoured career and do very well. With ABAP PaaS, these individuals get to extend their career and their skills, and customers benefit from that. ABAP PaaS presents modern possibilities for these individuals, and for others who are deliberately and consciously versed in other languages, ABAP PaaS represents choice.

That said, I think an even more important focus for ABAP PaaS is the use case which is one that is general to the cloud environment and a major raison d’être for the initiative. That is the ability to stop customising the core and build out extensions and new apps in a separate environment.

Business solutions these days span entire cloud and on-prem landscapes. We’re moving away from monolithic runtimes for business applications, due to the distributed nature of apps and services in a cloud-first context. Implicit in that nature is the concept one level up from PaaS, which is SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) – business solution software that to all intents and purposes only has a consumption surface layer, rather than any depth into which we can dig.

That surface layer consists of two types of interface – a user interface (UI) that is usually web-based, and a machine interface that is API (application programming interface) based. We can’t see inside these systems, and it’s not possible to extend or customise them directly. The massive advantage of this is that we don’t have to worry about their operation, much less their maintenance or upkeep. But we need to differentiate ourselves somehow – to extend the solutions to meet our own business needs, to give us that competitive advantage or to solve an organisation-specific challenge.

That’s where ABAP PaaS comes in, as one of a set of environments perfectly suited for building these extensions (another is of course the Application Programming Model and the Cloud Foundry environment).

But it’s not just extensions to SaaS solutions (like SuccessFactors or S/4HANA Cloud), it’s extensions for existing on-prem solutions, whether that’s S/4HANA, Business Suite or something else R/3 based. Yes, there are plenty of these on-prem systems that have been customised, but that’s not a reason to continue doing so. We need to think about making the journey to separate these concerns out – standard software and extensions to that standard software. And when I look at how ABAP PaaS has been designed, with the focus on CDS based and API focused service solutions, it starts to make a lot of sense to me.

From “SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment” by Harald Kuck

There’s no concept of UI as we understand it from the traditional on-prem R/3-based world. No dynpros, no transactions, no reports, no SAPGUI. Thinking back to the reference to Google’s App Engine earlier, it’s very similar – that PaaS offering doesn’t have a UI either. The focus of a PaaS is to provide facilities for “headless” solutions that both present and consume APIs that partake in landscape-wide solutions. The UI is separate – whether that UI follows the Fiori design language and is built with UI5, or whether it’s with another Web UI framework altogether. There may not even be a UI in the traditional sense – one thing today’s computing fabric is bringing us is a wider choice of how one interacts with solutions – think custom Internet of Things (IoT) devices and conversational UI such as bots in Slack and speech recognition in the form of the Google Assistant platform or Alexa (and of course there’s SAP CoPilot too).

What we miss from from the “legacy” ABAP platform is replaced by a sharp focus on openness – using git for software versioning and logistics, a RESTful programming model as the de facto approach to building solutions, and the use of HTTP in general to consume services from (and offer services to) other parts of the landscape.

The near future

There’s so much more to think about on this subject, but this post is already long enough. I think it’s a rather exciting time for SAP’s cloud-first initiatives in general, and for the ABAP community in particular. Many of us have already been learning about the programming model that is key to building solutions on ABAP PaaS, and that is the ABAP RESTful Programming Model. If you haven’t yet had chance to dig in, I’d recommend this SAP TechEd session, which is available online already: “CNA215 – See the Big Picture of the ABAP RESTful Programming Model, 2018 Las Vegas” by Marcel Hermanns. If you’re coming to SAP TechEd in Barcelona later this month, drop in to the Developer Garage to work through the SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment tutorials (access to an ABAP PaaS system will be provided).

It’s early days for ABAP PaaS. The team is taking a “release early, release often” approach to delivery, so I’m seeing today’s ABAP PaaS offering as a minimum viable product. Over time I expect to see the environment grow – in terms of whitelisting, in terms of comprehension and of course in terms of developer access.

For me, ABAP PaaS is full of potential and I for one welcome the prospect of building extensions and net new apps using this modern environment. I’d love to hear from you too. Let me know what you think in the comments section below.

This post was brought to you by Pact Coffee’s El Silencio which is helping me battle the jet lag after returning home from Las Vegas, by the hashtag #ABAPsNotDead, and by the clackety-clack of the Cherry MX Blue switches in the mechanical keyboard I’m trying out, as I embark upon a new obsession hobby.

Read more posts in this series here: Monday morning thoughts.