How to take your ABAP assets to the Cloud, part III.

[TimothySanty]

In this third part of the blog series on how to take your ABAP assets to the cloud using the SAP BTP, ABAP Environment aka Steampunk we’ll have a look at some typical use-cases for which this new environment might be the next best future proof solution.

Link to part I

Link to part II

Scenario 1: extend SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud and other SAP Cloud offerings.

Scenario 1

It’s quite essential for customers and partners that we now have an ABAP opportunity to build extensions for SAP Cloud solutions where in the past the only decent option was Java, loosing the ABAP community and their skill set.

In S/4HANA Public Cloud there is no support for classic custom ABAP development. The SAP Business Technology Platform was always the foundation to build and run custom Cloud extensions and now the new ABAP Environment option can be used for ABAP based Cloud extensions.

Scenario 2: develop and run innovative ABAP apps on a PaaS in the Cloud.

Scenario 2

In the previous parts of this blog series I showed you that Steampunk is completely independent of the back-end release of your SAP system. Thanks to this independence customers and partners partners can now start building apps for legacy SAP ECC systems based on the latest innovations.

Customers with legacy ECC systems can now also benefit from the newest ABAP Platform and SAP HANA database technologies, independent from their existing landscape. They can start developing Fiori apps with the new ABAP RESTful Programming Model and thanks to the full integration in the SAP BTP they can also incorporate all other Cloud services like IoT, machine learning, analytics and many more in their designs.

All of this is possible while delegating the operation of the ABAP PaaS and new technologies to SAP.

Scenario 3: decouple ABAP implementations from your core business systems.

Scenario 3

This scenario is one of the most interesting and important ones from a technical perspective.

You can use Steampunk to create extensions in a single entry point and connect them with several back-ends, independent of the back-end release. If you for example want to use data from different systems to analyse, Steampunk can act as an integration hub to first of all aggregate all the data and then make it available in one service.

Important to note is that Steampunk runs in the Cloud by nature, so you securely expose data from your back-end system to an external audience. In this way you can also use it as a kind of extraction layer.

Because of the decoupling of the Cloud extensions with the back-end system you strongly reduce the risk and effort for core business systems updates.

Partner Delivery Model

Partner Delivery Model

Steampunk can act as a platform where partners can develop Software as a service and make it available to several customers at once using multitenancy. The current approach is using the client field (MANDT) in the database tables for enabling multitenancy.

The partner will have two accounts, one Dev(elopment) and one Prod(uctive). In the productive account there will be only one instance of the application that is shared with multiple customers.

Summary

The third part of this blog series concludes the introduction the the SAP BTP, ABAP environment. In this part we've discussed the most common use cases and the Partner Delivery Model.

In future parts of this blog series I’ll take a deeper dive in the Partner Delivery Model. For now I’m still in the middle of designing this architectural set-up at delaware and with the much appreciated support of the SAP team we are on the verge of creating our first Saas PoC.

Stay tuned for more to come in the next weeks!

More information can be found on the SAP Store, in the solution brief or on the SAP Discovery Center. Make sure to also check out the SAP BTP, ABAP environment community page.

I also recommend to check out this openSAP course about the ABAP RESTful Programming Model.

I can also advice you two SAP Press books: one on ABAP in the Cloud and another on the ABAP RESTful Programming Model.