Dear SAP Cloud Integration, meet FlashPipe, your CI/CD companion

Slightly over a year ago, I wrote Dear SAP Cloud Platform Integration, where is my CI/CD pipeline?. As there is no native out-of-the-box solution/capability provided by SAP, I decided to experiment with it myself and hopefully learn a thing or two along the way.

Today, I’m proud to present the results of many hours of tinkering, learning and coding-fun… 😁

The CI/CD Companion for SAP Integration Suite

FlashPipe is an open-source solution (under Apache 2.0 License terms) that is available as a public Docker image. It contains the functionality needed for automating the Build-To-Deploy tasks for SAP Integration Suite. The initial release supports Cloud Integration, with further capabilities planned for the future. It can be used with any CI/CD platform that supports container-based execution.

So how does it work?

Simple!

Download and extract the Integration Flow contents, and store it into a Git repository.

Configure your CI/CD platform – provide the pipeline steps, the tenant access details and the Git repository.

Execute the pipeline, then sit back and watch it do the rest! 😉

From this point onwards, whenever your changes are committed to Git and pushed, it will automatically trigger the pipeline to do the rest for you!

Try it for yourself!

Not convinced? Try it out for yourself! Head over to FlashPipe’s documentation site where you can find step-by-step example of how you can set it up.

Any limitations?

FlashPipe is not perfect – how can it be, when it is created by an imperfect human?

Due to the nature of the development approach in SAP Integration Suite, as well as the (current) limitations of the product, some areas still require manual steps like the following:

• Due to the lack of native Git integration, changes made to the Integration Artifact on the Web UI needs to be manually downloaded and “pushed” to Git. While such capability is among the top most voted requests (https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/247918) in the Customer Influence Project for SAP Integration Suite, the jury is still out as to whether we are going to get this anytime soon. Updated 5 July: You can now also use FlashPipe to sync your IFlow contents to GitHub – check it out here.
• Credentials are managed separately from integration artifacts as security material. Currently this is not part of the automated deployment and requires manual step to create/update the security materials in each target environment.

More details?

If you are interested in the nitty-gritty details, would love to contribute or just want to have a peak under the hood, feel free to visit FlashPipe’s repository on GitHub.