Greetings to all the SAP automation people out there!
The quick read: SP05 for SAP Landscape Management 3.0 has been released this week and is available for
download at the SAP Service Marketplace with the full list of new features, enhancements, and changes
listed and described here. Please keep in mind that
release 2.1 will be out of maintenance after March 7th, so get it while it's hot!
As the most important news is out of the way now, allow me to take you for a (space) walk for a minute. Space? Oh, yes. Just in case you could not make it to this year's
SAP TechEd and watch the SAP Executive Keynote with Capt. James Tiberius Kirk (aka
bjoern.goerke) on
Boldly Going Beyond, give yourself a treat and grab the
recording here. If not, well... kindly ignore all those Star Trek references popping up everywhere!
Custom Processes with SAP Steps
Back on topic: Of course, automating and standardizing your complex SAP Basis and Infrastructure processes with
SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) is powerful, efficient, visual, and fun. But adding to that, it has now become even better:
To make the most out of
Custom Processes, they are now fully capable of being peppered with both your very own and also
SAP steps all the way. So what does that mean for you? Did you ever find yourself looking at SAP-predefined processes (like
near Zero Downtime Maintenance for SAP HANA) thinking "That's awesome, but I'd like to take the powerful standard process and extend it with my very own actions"? Well, that's exactly one of the use cases enabled by this. Take the LaMa standard Custom Processes, create your very own ones out of it, and then... change, adapt, and extend them just the way you want to!
Okay, wait... so where is the match between your processes and the predefined SAP ones? And why are all of them called "Custom Processes"? That is because they all rely on LaMa's very own and powerful process engine which allows you (and us too!) to model and create virtually any kind of process needed. As it allows for full customization, we named it the Custom Process Engine - hence the name of the Custom Processes.
Automation for Hybrid Cloud environments
So that was a lot of "processes" there. And yes, processes mean automation. Now where is the link to Hybrid Cloud? Keep in mind all the automation and standardization use cases of SAP Landscape Management: SAP system provisioning, powerful operations for SAP HANA, Process Design and Extensibility, all accessible from a Centralized Management solution within your SAP landscape. For your business, these areas of operation mean reliability, speed, and agility. Does your business have to care about the type and location of the infrastructure you leverage to provide your services? Well, of course not. Why would they care? So why would you care, either?
With SAP Landscape Management, you are able to just "consume" infrastructure - when it is needed and the way it is needed, as well. Besides all traditional on-premise architecture types (both physical or virtual), SAP Landscape Management is able to connect to real Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementations. May it be your
OpenStack implementation for Private Cloud or Public Cloud offerings as from our partners at
Amazon Web Services and
Microsoft Azure (with support for
Google Cloud Platform to follow).
Tailoring Private Cloud implementations and Public Cloud offerings to your needs gets you into the Hybrid Cloud business - now with Automation by LaMa already waiting to deliver. Oh, so you want to go even further and also fully leverage the power and flexibility of
SAP HANA Multitenant Database Containers on top of your Hybrid IaaS Cloud? We hear your call - and LaMa has still got you covered with automation for
tenant operations, as well.
Talking to the outside world
With SAP Landscape Management offering automation and standardization for SAP operations and Hybrid IaaS Cloud landscapes, it takes on an important role in your control room. The more important and connected your role, the more links and connections to you from the outside world. Company-wide orchestrators, corporate dashbaords, service-based implementations... they all want to talk to you!
SAP Landscape Mangement addresses this need of openness and communication by offering a
powerful REST interface to the world (and its developers, that is). So you want your SAP experts define all your SAP standard operations in LaMa, store them as
Blueprints, and then trigger and monitor them without LaMa even being visible? REST is the way!
Live long and prosper
With the real story been told, let me close the way I did open all my TechEd sessions this year for one last time. Automation: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the LaMa. Its mission: To simplify Hybrid Cloud management, to seek out new ways for SAP Basis efficiency and customer happyness, to boldly automate where no LaMa has automated before.
Warp Speed, Mr. Sulu!
