Solved: Re: DevOps in SAP environment

former_member10909 · ‎2020 Dec 25

Hi Experts

We have been using SAP as our system of record for last 15 years in waterfall basis. Now due to a recent reorganization we have been given a mandate to organise the IT organization for DevOps.

It would be great if you could provide your insights on how DevOps can be integrated into sap environment.

Best Regards

P

sanilbhandari · ‎2020 Dec 25

Hi miglani2011

I would start with the statement that thinking DevOps cannot be used in a wholesome SAP Environment is a state of mind, which can and should be changed. The days of years long development cycle are long gone and the projects or business transformation have to be agile in nature. To answer your question, the below blog should be quite useful.

https://blogs.sap.com/2017/06/14/a-practical-guide-to-devops-for-sap/

https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/14/devops-for-sap-laying-the-foundations-for-success/

I have worked in a SAP environment for last five years, where the entire value chain of business was broken down into smaller products. I would quote a simple example of "opportunity to cash" as a value chain. Across this process chain, there were agile teams comprising of IT and BPO across various topics like lead management, conversion, quote management, contracting, order management, delivery, invoicing, credit management and cash management. The teams were constantly developing new features and also supporting the applications which went live as well. The teams were super expert in their areas due to focused run around their scope of work. A heavy focus in the product teams was to have cross expertise and heavy use of automation over a period of time. This reduced the delivery cycle. Also the functionalities to production were delivered in a smaller period of time rather than big bang approaches which typical SAP Projects and consultants have been used to.

Use of tools like JIRA helped in cross application dependencies and priortizations, which made possible the deliveries on a continuos basis.

This is not a single step journey, but a multi year and constantly evolving and adaption journey.

The key enabler for success is ability to define the products and ensuring agile adaption over a period of time.

Hope I have been able to answer your question.

Thanks & Regards

Sanil Bhandari

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sanilbhandari · ‎2020 Dec 25

Hi miglani2011

I would start with the statement that thinking DevOps cannot be used in a wholesome SAP Environment is a state of mind, which can and should be changed. The days of years long development cycle are long gone and the projects or business transformation have to be agile in nature. To answer your question, the below blog should be quite useful.

https://blogs.sap.com/2017/06/14/a-practical-guide-to-devops-for-sap/

https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/14/devops-for-sap-laying-the-foundations-for-success/

I have worked in a SAP environment for last five years, where the entire value chain of business was broken down into smaller products. I would quote a simple example of "opportunity to cash" as a value chain. Across this process chain, there were agile teams comprising of IT and BPO across various topics like lead management, conversion, quote management, contracting, order management, delivery, invoicing, credit management and cash management. The teams were constantly developing new features and also supporting the applications which went live as well. The teams were super expert in their areas due to focused run around their scope of work. A heavy focus in the product teams was to have cross expertise and heavy use of automation over a period of time. This reduced the delivery cycle. Also the functionalities to production were delivered in a smaller period of time rather than big bang approaches which typical SAP Projects and consultants have been used to.

Use of tools like JIRA helped in cross application dependencies and priortizations, which made possible the deliveries on a continuos basis.

This is not a single step journey, but a multi year and constantly evolving and adaption journey.

The key enabler for success is ability to define the products and ensuring agile adaption over a period of time.

Hope I have been able to answer your question.

Thanks & Regards

Sanil Bhandari

somnath · ‎2020 Dec 25

Hello,

Already a very good answer given by Sanil, just to add my understanding and interpretation and of course not to make you overwhelmed with this!

As per my information, CI/CD pipelines are available as a solution with gCTS (Git Enabled CTS) from S4 HANA 1909 and 2020 (with customized TR).

Now if you are already on S4 then you can think about this gCTS approach or maybe the Git process can be achieved through AbapGit which will enable your development process versionable using the Git versioning process.

Now you would need some CI server to automate certain things like ATC check and ABAP unit testing, for that you need to invest in Test Driven Development. or TDD so that if the deployment goes wrong or creating a regression then this TDD will able to catch with automated testing and put the development back to the developers to correct the bug.

Jenkins is a renowned CI server and GitLab also quite promising. So certain Git hook needed to be set up so that while you are releasing TR in the "Dev" system then it shouldn't get into the Transport layer rather it will create a version in your Git repository.

Jenkins pipelines will help now to automate certain checks as I mentioned above. If everything looks fine then the same version should be auto imported into the target system.

Some documentation on Piper project: https://sap.github.io/jenkins-library/

Not sure if this added any value to your requirement, hope this will help little.

- Regards, Som

rzamudio · ‎2020 Dec 29

Hello miglani2011

Here additional publications that might be of your interest.

https://blogs.sap.com/2018/06/19/trust-is-the-foundation-of-devops/

https://blogs.sap.com/2019/09/11/sap-community-topics-page-devops-launched/

https://community.sap.com/topics/devops

I wish you success in your organizations DevOps transormation!

Regards,

Ruth

nlara1 · ‎2021 Mar 26

Hi Prakash, we recently implemented DevOps in our SAP ERP environment. Our post has more info that might be helpful to you. https://blogs.sap.com/2021/03/26/our-journey-with-sap-erp-devops-part-1-2/