DevOps with SAP BTP: Plan & Setup

After I have provided the overview of our portfolio of tools/services that help to foster DevOps principles and simplify adoption for cloud-native applications as well as hybrid scenarios in my previous article, I will offer more insights on especially the Plan & Set Up phase in this blog post.

Goal of this first phase of the overall approach outlined in the figure below is to decide on basic aspects around DevOps and lifecycle management and to set up required infrastructures and toolchains for applying DevOps principles efficiently for your apps to be developed and run with SAP BTP.

Best Practices with SAP BTP Guide

To plan your projects around SAP BTP, the Best Practices with SAP BTP guide explains basic platform concepts and provides guidance, such as for account structuring, development and delivery.

It is a good first read to learn about many operations aspects around SAP BTP.

Also, the guide provides guidance on account structuring, with many examples.

SAP Discovery Center

Another good entry point to get further information about the cloud platform offering and to gain first hands-on experience is the SAP Discovery Center, where SAP also offers many missions, for example to implement a business-specific scenario with ease or to set up and onboard some of our DevOps services on the platform.

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)

A corner stone for development and test and increased agility and quality in a DevOps environment is Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD), the practice of integrating frequently into a common source code repository and then validating and testing implemented changes automatically – by using a CI/CD pipeline. Such a pipeline triggers involved tools and infrastructures – such as to initiate builds, trigger automated tests running on open source or third-party tools and deployments – and provides transparency on the outcome of pipeline runs.

To adopt CI/CD around development projects in SAP environments easily, there are several offerings:

• If you want to configure and run automated pipelines without own CI/CD infrastructure and without the need for in-depth CI/CD knowledge, consider the SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service. It allows you to jumpstart CI/CD processes especially around SAP-centric use cases, such as for SAPUI5 and Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model based projects.
  
• If you should have an own CI/CD infrastructure in place already or you should need more flexibility, Project “Piper” provides pre-configured pipelines and templates that you can use in your own CI/CD infrastructure and adapt according to your needs. For this, a library of steps is offered (that you can use to extend and adapt your pipeline) and a set of containerized tool images that you can download and add to your existing pipeline.
  
• If you should need full flexibility, the Continuous Integration and Delivery Best Practices Guide provides simple procedures to implement continuous delivery pipelines on any CI/CD stack and a basic understanding how to apply CI/CD principles to SAP-specific technology, with whatever CI/CD infrastructure you might have or plan to use.

Result

Result of the Plan & Set Up phase should be a clear understanding of your overall DevOps approach and ideally a configured environment, including CI/CD infrastructure for your development projects (at least in a first version for build and test – then to be further extended and evolved as required).

Continue with Develop & Test, the next phase in your DevOps adoption journey with SAP BTP, where your development teams use the automated pipeline to come up with increments in the form of development and application content of high quality.