How to integrate SAP Cloud Transport Management into your CI/CD pipeline

If you wish for a standardized, enterprise-ready change management process for your applications running on SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Cloud Transport Management* is the right service for you. It allows you to manage the transport of development artifacts and application-specific content (such as from SAP Cloud Integration) between different SAP BTP accounts and adds transparency on the audit trail of changes – get information about who performed which changes in your production accounts and when. Also, SAP Cloud Transport Management allows you to establish a separation of concerns: for example, a developer (of an application or SAP BTP content artifacts) can trigger the propagation of the latest changes, which then results in a transport handled by a central ops team. 

You can use SAP Cloud Transport Management as an additional layer of control to manage your production landscape (DEV, PRE-PROD, PROD). Also, you have the option to complement a Continuous Integration (CI) approach to, firstly, apply agile principles to your DEV account and then, secondly, apply transport management to implement rules, policies and schedules to control releases to production. Thereby, you get the best out of two worlds with the right mix of agility and control. 

For this combined approach, a smooth integration from the automated CI environment into the controlled transport management environment is key. To enable this scenario, the transport management service is integrated into SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service and SAP’s  library for continuous delivery with open-source and third-party CI/CD servers – Project “Piper”. 

With this integration, your fully qualified Multitarget Application (MTA) archive gets automatically handed over to the SAP Cloud Platform Transport Management service, along the following typical process flow:

• First, the artefact is put into the import queue of the target node specified in the CI pipeline (e.g. Pre-PROD)
• Then, an operator can manually trigger or schedule the import, which results in a physical deployment of the MTA archive into the corresponding sub-account
• Once the import is executed, a transport is triggered along the defined transport route, so that the MTA archive reaches the import queue of the next node (e.g. PROD)
• There, again, the physical import can be triggered manually or via a job scheduler

How to enable the SAP Cloud Transport Management service in your CI/CD pipeline? 

1. Ensure that you have access to the SAP Cloud Transport Management service. For more information, see Provide Access to SAP Cloud Transport Management.
2. Make sure you have set up the SAP Cloud Transport Management service and created a service key. For more information, see Set Up the Environment to Transport Content Archives directly in an Application. 
3. Configure your SAP Cloud Transport Management landscape. 
4. Store the SAP Cloud Platform Transport Management service key in the Jenkins secure store as “secret text” credentials. 
5. Enable the step “tmsUpload” in your Project “Piper” environment by choosing one of the following options:

• • Configure SAP Cloud Transport Management within the Release Stage of the general purpose pipeline of Project “Piper” or
  • Enable SAP Cloud Transport Management within the ProductionEnvironment stage of your general purpose pipeline or
  • Reference the “tmsUpload” step in your existing pipeline. 

*) SAP Cloud Transport Management introduction video