Devops with focus on ABAP-centric solutions

Currently the cloud products are getting popular and in future ABAP developments will follow RESTful programming model. Its time companies follow Agile methodology for delivery to move towards DevOps culture. Following Agile will help build multiskilled consultants in project. If still Agile is not adapted its high time to think of change. Sharing my personal insights how SAP helps in journey to DevOps.

SAP is pursuing more continuous development, integration and deployment which can increase innovation speed. In other words, its making companies to be more agile and have capabilities to innovate and recover from failure quickly.

In future I can see companies transform their team capabilities.

In many organizations or projects, I can see the teams are separated for example ABAP consultant, BASIS consultant, PI/PO consultant working as silos. This leads to high cost and team doesn’t realize the value or benefit they bring to the product or project.

The goal of DevOps is to overcome this challenge.

Four Principals of DevOps

• Culture
  • Shared ownership
  • Collaboration
• Measurement
  • Customer experience
  • Speed of development
  • Software quality
• Automation
  • Continuous integration
  • Continuous delivery
  • Flexible landscape
• Sharing
  • Overlapping skill set
  • Issue resolution

How can a organization bring DevOps culture? How can organization enable sharing skills and knowledge between people in different layers such as development and operations?

When a company decides to adopt the journey of DevOps this requires adoption of tools, processes, and people. It requires a mind shift in people and their organization.

Agile development is the first step to journey to DevOps.

SAP recommends using  SAP Solution Manager 7.2, which can help in implementing and running DevOps. It come with integrated technical and business process monitoring and operations capabilities for SAP and third-party solutions.

• ChaRM tool supports change process management
• Execution of changes through transport system is supported
• It also offers the features to integrate non-ABAP tools including Jenkins and Git

SAP Solution Manager tool was initially developed to meet the best practices of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). Agile being first step to DevOps, Solution Manager will help to get started with practices for DevOps. Since January the usage rights of SAP Solution Manager include Focused Build and Focused Insights

I think DevOps getting popular as many are moving towards cloud solutions for digital transformation. Definitely DevOps culture will help to bring development and operation team together to speed up deployment of innovative changes.