About this time last year, Casey West and I announced we were embarking on a journey to bring developer communities closer together.

Since then, we’ve visited 7 different cities on 3 continents demonstrating how to integrate SAP HANA and Google BigQuery: São Paulo, New York, Hannover, Munich, Vancouver, Los Angeles and Mannheim.

We also shared our love for coding, integrations and collaboration at Google Next ’18 in San Francisco and the three editions of SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, Barcelona and Bangalore.

Kevin Nelson, a Developer Advocate for Google (both an amazing technologist and a great cook) started contributing as part of this fun team at SAP TechEd Las Vegas.

Together we met more than a thousand developers in person around the globe.

Last week, we were joined by Ekaterina Kruse, product manager in the S/4HANA Cloud SDK team.

Ekaterina has been sharing her knowledge with the developer community through blog posts and tutorials for a while.

Google Cloud + SAP CodeJam: S/4HANA Cloud SDK, CI/CD on Kubernetes, Machine Learning and much more

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK for SAP Cloud Platform is very useful to build side-by-side extensions. In other words, you get your S/4HANA Cloud instance and enrich the standard logic with the help of the SDK. We enhanced our Business Partners entity with some calls to Machine Learning APIs. Now they are super Business Partners.

What is the S/4HANA Cloud SDK for?

Ekaterina explained it in a way we could all understand: with code.

The SDK makes the integration and handling of business objects easy, so developers can focus on solving business problems.

The Cloud SDK comes with cloud-native development concepts. One of the main benefits behind cloud-native development is agility. Agility as in enabling new features faster and with less risk (because they are smaller… and a change control board does not take months to approve a transport).

How? Part of this is a CI/CD pipeline running in Google Kubernetes Engine that automates testing and deploys our application into SAP Cloud Platform.

Finally, we explored how to apply SAP HANA specific functionalities with an application based on the Cloud Application Programming model using SAP HANA, express edition.

You can request your own CodeJam

A lot of this is explained in content of public access, so you could eventually achieve this yourself, on your own, but without the free food.

But why would you? Learning is more fun with other people in your community and the insights gained from Ekaterina, Casey, Kevin and yours truly in our talks during the day.

Find out how you can request your own CodeJam for free at the SAP Developer Center: https://www.sap.com/community/events/codejam.html#II_Want_an_SAP_CodeJam.