Project “Piper” and Azure DevOps: Successful Collaboration with ‘delaware’

delaware is a fast-growing global consulting company that delivers advanced solutions and services to organizations striving for sustainable, competitive advantage. With the slogan “delivering tomorrow today”, it applies the ecosystems of its main partners SAP and Microsoft to guide customers through their business transformations. Afterward, it continues to serve its customers to ensure the continuity of operations as well as continuous improvement. Within its organization, delaware has established the Cloud Enablement & Operations team, which involves 18 young people, who describe themselves as “grown up with cloud, breathing cloud, and eating cloud.” They focus on administrating software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service products as well as testing and implementing different solutions within the company to guide delaware to a more agile environment.

Being the largest delivering partner of SAP consulting services in Belgium, delaware provides custom multi-target applications (MTAs) that run on SAP Cloud Platform in the Cloud Foundry environment. To facilitate their shipments, the Cloud Enablement & Operations group decided to support their MTA development with a continuous delivery pipeline. A perfect use case for project “Piper”! This CI/CD solution by SAP offers ready-made pipelines, a shared library with reusable steps, and a set of Docker images to quickly set up an environment for continuous integration and delivery.

Attracted by the open-source character of project “Piper” and the opportunity to receive direct feedback on their use case, the team reached out to us to adapt their existing pipelines for CI/CD. However, project “Piper” is originally based on Jenkins as underlying CI tool – and delaware uses Azure DevOps, instead.

Therefore, we’ve worked out a pipeline setup on Azure DevOps that uses project “Piper” Docker images and at the same time, started to make them work independently from Jenkins. You can try it out yourselves: Have a look at How to Use Project “Piper” Docker Images for CI/CD with Azure DevOps.

Now, delaware’s workflow looks as follows: The company uses an Ubuntu 18.04 operating system on which Docker runs as a controlled self-hosted agent. The Git repository as well as the build and release pipelines are located on Azure DevOps. Each commit automatically triggers a new build, which launches a container from the project “Piper” Docker image Multitarget Application Archive Builder on the self-hosted agent. The Docker container builds the MTA archive and initiates integrated automated tests. Having passed the tests, the MTA archive is uploaded into the artifact repository on Azure DevOps, which triggers a release using the project “Piper” Docker image Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface. This image deploys the MTAR artifact to the desired space on SAP Cloud Platform in the Cloud Foundry environment.

delaware’s Workflow for Using Project “Piper” with Azure DevOps

Project “Piper” seamlessly integrates into delaware’s CI/CD strategy and leverages their existing build and release pipelines on Azure DevOps. With little effort, the company was able to transform its pipelines into a more agile environment. Still, our collaboration hasn’t come to an end, yet. delaware continues to use project “Piper” Docker images on its journey to becoming even more agile:

“The project “Piper” Docker images have proven to be the perfect building block to implement better DevOps practices.”

Do you want to collaborate with us and find out how to use our CI/CD offerings in your specific scenario, as well? Feel free to reach out to us by leaving a comment.

Are you new to CI/CD by SAP? Have a look at Continuous Integration and Delivery by SAP.

Do you want to learn more about SAP’s CI/CD offerings? See SAP Solutions for Continuous Integration and Delivery. For more information, see also DevOps at SAP and SAP Cloud Platform.

Are you interested in delaware’s Cloud Foundry solutions? See Accelerator Pack: SAP Cloud Platform with Mendix & Fiori Cloud.