SAP BTP ABAP Environment – Maintenance Windows and Major Upgrade Windows in 2024

[AndreasWehry]

One of the benefits of using SAP BTP ABAP Environment is that updates and upgrades are applied by SAP to the systems in quite a high frequency and close to the corresponding release time.
Find the latest known schedule of Major Upgrade Windows and Weekly Maintenance Windows for 2024 in this blog.

Major Upgrade Windows

As in 2023, the SAP BTP ABAP Environment will have 4 Major Upgrade Windows in 2024. These 24 hours of potential system unavailability are used to upgrade the systems to the next major version.
The events for the Major Upgrade Windows are harmonized between all SAP Cloud Products and scheduled for the following weekends:

• February 17th – 18th (Release 2402) | Pre-upgrade option for release 2402

• May 18th – 19th (Release 2405) | Pre-upgrade option for release 2405

• August 17th – 18th (Release 2408) | Pre-upgrade option for release 2408

• November 16th – 17th (Release 2411) | Pre-upgrade option for release 2411

Depending on the data center region, the 24 hours downtime will start/end at:

• APJ: FRI 9 pm – SAT 9 pm UTC

• Europe: SAT 4 am – SUN 4 am UTC

• Americas: SAT 10 am – SUN 10 am UTC

The upgrade of the free tier systems takes place on the Thursday before the respective weekend. 

Weekly Maintenance Windows

Potentially every weekend, the SAP BTP ABAP Environment could use a downtime of 4 hours, to apply database updates, Hotfix Collections and other changes.
Depending on the data center region, the 4 hours downtime may start at:

• APJ: SAT 3 pm UTC

• Europe: SAT 10 pm UTC

• Americas: SUN 4 am UTC

The update of the free tier systems takes place on the Thursday before the respective weekend.
The following events for the release 2411 are planned as Weekly Maintenance Windows in 2024:

• Hotfix Collection 3 for Release 2411 (only for systems which belong to the pre-upgrade)
  November 16th – 17th, 2024
• Hotfix Collection 4 for Release 2411
  November 30th – December 1st, 2024
• Hotfix Collection 5 for Release 2411
  December 14th – 15th, 2024
• Hotfix Collection 6 for Release 2411
  January 11th – 12th, 2025

For more details about the Reduction of Planned Maintenance Windows for HFC Imports and Upgrades see our roadmap.

Cloud System Notification Subscriptions (CSNS)

Please register to Cloud System Notification Subscriptions (CSNS) to get important information about planned and unplanned downtimes:

• Access to Cloud System Notification Subscriptions (CSNS): https://me.sap.com/systemsprovisioning/getNotified
• More information about Cloud System Notification Subscriptions (CSNS) in this documentation and video guide
• To find the SAP BTP ABAP Environment entry select
  Cloud Product: SAP Extension Suite - Development Efficiency
  Cloud Service: SAP BTP, ABAP environment
  
  

References

• Maintenance Windows and Major Upgrade Windows for SAP Cloud Services

• SAP Note 2888562 – Intelligent Enterprise Suite: Harmonized release calendar for SAP Cloud products

• Service Level Agreement for SAP Cloud Services

[SamS]

Hello,

I'm wondering whent the pre-upgrade notes for the August 17th – 18th release (2408) will be posted?

Thanks.

Sam

[AndreasWehry]

Hello Sam,

the notes regarding the pre-upgrade for August 17th - 18th are maintained and will be posted asap.

Regards, Andreas

[SamS]

For the ability to postpone releases, what timing options are available for postponing, and what does it depend on? Eg. 1 week or up to even 6 months?

Thanks,

Sam

[FrankJentsch]

Currently, it is not intended to postpone a release upgrade according to a customer's schedule. Only in rare exceptional cases based on the findings of a pre-upgrade test, it might be required to postpone the upgrade. Please refer to the blog post about the pre-upgrade mentioned above.  

[Vedaj_r]

@anyone , is this downtime applicable for SAP BTP ABAP environment for TRAIL systems also ? 
 

• Hotfix Collection 3 for Release 2408 (only for systems which belong to the pre-upgrade)
  August 17th – 18th, 2024

[AndreasWehry]

Dear Vedaj_r,

On the weekend (August 17th/18th) there are two different LM events:

- all systems which did not belong to the pre-upgrade will be upgraded from 2405 to 2408 HFC3

- all systems which did belong to the pre-upgrade are already running on 2408 HFC2. These systems will get an update from 2408 HFC2 to 2408 HFC3

At  the end of the weekend all systems are on 2408 HFC3, i.e. all systems are on the same status. 

I hope I have explained it for you. In case of further questions please contact me again. 

Regards, Andreas 

[ArunkumarAS]

Hi @AndreasWehry ,
Where can we find the information on the hotfix provided for 2408? We are facing an issue since Oct-7-2024, so I want to check if there is any inputs on the Hotfix provided.

Regards
Arunkumar AS

[AndreasWehry]

Hi Arunkumar AS,

what kind of information do you mean? Can you please provide us more details regarding the issue you mentioned. Do you have created a ticket for your issue?

Regards, Andreas

[ArunkumarAS]

Hi @AndreasWehry ,
I did not create a ticket so far. But I was able to resolve the issue now on my own.
In all the table functions implemented in AMDP, there was error in all places where I have used SESSION_CONTEXT( 'CLIENT' ). I had to replace them with MANDT field from the datasource.

Existing which showed error
RETURN select SESSION_CONTEXT( 'CLIENT' ) as Client, key, value from :XYZ

After Modification
RETURN mandt as Client, key, value from :XYZ

 Also in all the places where I was fetching any decimal value or dates I had specify the conversion as to_decimal() and to_dats() without which it was giving error.

Existing which showed error
RETURN select price, updated_date from :XYZ

After Modification
RETURN select to_decimal( price,15,3 ) as price to_dats( updated_date) as updated_date from :XYZ

All these were happening in the existing unchanged code which is already deployed and working in production. But in production there is error shown and still the code is executing properly. But in development when I make any adjustment I cannot activate until I make all these changes. It took time to figure out how to fix them by us but still no clue why this happened.

[AndreasWehry]

Hi Arunkumar AS,

can you please create a ticket for this issue. Afterwards, we will take care.

Thank you and best regards

Andreas 

[AndreasWehry]

Hi Arunkumar AS,

the issue will be fixed with HFC7 (planned on Oct. 19).

Regards, Andreas

[ArunkumarAS]

Dear Andreas

Thanks for your support and feedback on this topic.

Regards
Arunkumar AS

[JamesIan]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for the information about when the steampunk maintenance windows occur. My client is a global organization with a multi-regional deployment. I cannot find any articles on the best strategy on how to handle this period. I thought about using a load balancer to re-direct any incoming calls to, for example, to a RAP service. However looking at these maintenance periods,  there are times when even globally not one of the regions is actually available. I think the 4 periods per year is perhaps manageable through various strategies, but the fact that it is possible it could be down every weekend that concerns me. Could you offer some advice please.

regards

James M.

[HarryX]

Hello,

2411 was upgraded just the past weekend. When will the schedule & dates of BTP ABAP Hotfix for 2411 be published? Will it be updated in the post here or somewhere else?

[AndreasWehry]

Hello,

the dates for 2411 have already been updated and can be seen soon. 

Regards, Andreas