continuous delivery for SAP S/4HANA Cloud*

Updated Innovation Cycle

Our continuous delivery strategy

Coming from a quarterly release cycle, SAP S/4HANA Cloud has started to reduce the number of releases and system upgrades per year and in parallel provide frequent updates in between these releases.  Overall goal: to significantly reduce the effort associated with release upgrades while innovations can be adopted faster and more flexibly in between releases.

* In the beginning continuous delivery for SAP S/4HANA Cloud was also referred to as Continuous Feature Delivery (CFD)

Why we introduced updates

Why we introduced updates

The benefits we see are the following:  

1. Deliveries without disruption
Updates will not interfere with the daily work of SAP S/4HANA Cloud end users. No regression tests are necessary. The reduced number of releases combined with frequent updates will keep your systems more stable.     

   

2. Flexible adoption of innovations
Continuous deliveries are updates that consist of pre-delivered new functionalities. Features delivered behind toggles give customers the flexibility to actively decide whether to put a functionality into operation and, if necessary, implement the required change management. Or to wait until the releases following the update since features delivered behind a toggle will then be available to all customers by default.  

    

3. Faster action on feedback or improvement requests    The higher update frequency of continuous delivery allows us to innovate faster and respond more quickly to improvement requests. Some functionalities delivered via update 2111.1 for example directly react on votes out of the SAP Customer Influence portal. 

What to consider now

What to consider now

  • Updates include optional pre-deliveries of new functionality. If a delivered functionality is not yet required, or the respective change management currently cannot be executed, the feature will be part of the upcoming release per default.

  

  • Every SAP S/4HANA Cloud customer is enabled to individually switch on functionalities based on features via Activate New Features app.