Manual Export/Import vs Cloud Transport Management Service to transport BTP projects

[ayechan]

Hi experts, 

I'm confusing which method is better between manual export/import and Cloud Transport Management Service to transport BTP projects like Build Process Automation approval workflows, Business Application Studio ui5 apps and Integration Suite iflows.

I checked some blogs and it is recommended to use Cloud Transport Management Service instead manual export/import.

By using Cloud Transport Management Service, there are advantages like Manual effort (no need to reconfigure everything), Less error-prone and so on.

So, I tried to transport one of my BPA approval process by using both methods.

And the results are same.

I needed to reconfigure the same steps for both methods.

There is no difference between them and using cTMS is more complex for me because there is initial set up and additional cost too.

So, could you please explain details why and when cTMS should be used, in details?

Thank You.

Aye Chan

[BorisZarske]

Hello Aye Chan!

Thanks for your question! If you have a simple PoC that you work on on your own, manual export/import or an automated CI/CD pipeline* (see my comment at the end) might really be an option.

The value of a central transport management approach comes into play when you have an application or project where several people are working on and where you need enterprise-ready control for your production environment.

With SAP Cloud Transport Management, you can centrally define and manage your delivery landscapes - what nodes do you have, what transport routes are in place, who is allowed to handle changes on which node. And all this with a central log file of your changes, such as for auditing reasons. In addition, SAP Cloud Transport Management allows you to centrally handle your SAP BTP changes synchronized with changes from other environments, for which SAP Cloud Transport Management can be orchestrated from change management tools, such as from SAP Cloud ALM -  think of a hybrid scenario, where you have changes from SAP BTP (like a UI) that have interdependencies to changes in your backend systems (such as enablement of APIs in SAP S/4HANA). Instead of manually handling the interconnected changes separately for each environment (and manually managing that they get propagated towards production in a synchronized way), you just assign both changes to one feature in SAP Cloud ALM and then manage the delivery of this feature (same applies to change documents of Change and Request Management - ChaRM - of SAP Solution Manager).

So, in the end, it is a question if you work on a solution that has to be enterprise-ready or not.

I hope this does help to clarify the situation and your options.

Best regards,
Boris

*) As I mentioned a CI/CD pipeline - for your SAPUI5 apps, in case you should work with Git repositories, I recommend to look at SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service - due to the pre-configured pipelines for typical SAP BTP development use cases, you can come up with a simple build and deploy pipeline in minutes. If you then move from PoC to an app to be run in production, you can simply switch on an automated hand-over from CI to transport (for this, SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery has a corresponding option in its Cloud Foundry pipeline template). Here a blog post to check out this overall DevOps approach: DevOps with SAP BTP - SAP Community (incl. links to the involved services).

[ayechan]

Hi @BorisZarske 

Thanks for the details answer.

Best regards,

Aye Chan