Software Logistics for SAP Business Technology Platform

Along the lifecycle of cloud-native and hybrid applications, consider the software logistics and DevOps offerings with SAP Business Technology Platform that ease the handling and operation of your apps with enterprise readiness, outlined in the categories listed below.

For more information, also check out the learning journey Discovering DevOps with SAP BTP and the DevOps with SAP BTP page in the SAP Help Portal.

 

Setup & Plan

Use the SAP BTP Administrator's Guide to set up your environment on SAP Business Technology Platform, such as by performing account structuring.

If you want to apply Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) principles for your development projects, consider the offerings around Continuous Integration and Delivery by SAP to apply CI/CD for your SAP projects (by using SAP's Pipeline-as-a-Service offering or by setting up your own CI/CD environment and infrastructure, for which SAP provides pipeline templates you can download, pipeline step libraries to extend/adapt your pipeline, and containerized tools you can integrate into your pipeline).

 

Develop & Build

Cloud business applications are typically composed of multiple modules that are developed using different languages and technologies, get deployed to a variety of target runtime environments, and have dependencies to consider. The Multitarget Application approach helps you to handle these interdependencies and allows an automated deployment of your applications on SAP Business Technology Platform.

If you apply CI/CD principles, you will use your corresponding automated pipelines to perform automated builds, tests and deployments along all required categories and to execute builds.

 

Deploy & Change

If you need more control of your deployments in enterprise environments, especially towards your production environment, you can use transport management to handle the propagation of your changes in SAP Business Technology Platform - either for all your subaccounts (such as for changes from DEV to TST and PROD) or complementing CI/CD approaches with a defined handover of qualified release candidates from your development landscape into a delivery landscape (from DEV to PRE-PROD and PROD). With this, you can add transparency on the audit trail of your cloud changes, establish a separation of concerns, and gain the option to integrate your cloud changes into change management, to synchronize cloud transports with on-premise changes.

  • To apply such a standardized, enterprise-ready transport management process for your changes in SAP Business Technology Platform, use the cloud-based SAP Cloud Transport Management service that lets you manage transports between SAP BTP accounts in Cloud Foundry, Neo and SAP BTP, ABAP environments. Transport development artifacts (in form of Multitarget Application archives) and application-specific content, such as SAP Integration Suite content.
  • In special cases, where you have ABAP-based transport already in place and only have to transport content in the form of Multitarget Application archives, you could consider to use/extend the enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+) to handle transports between your accounts on SAP Business Technology Platform. Nevertheless, be aware that there are no plans to extend cloud content coverage for CTS+, so the recommended way forward is the usage of SAP Cloud Transport Management service for the handling of SAP BTP content. For more information, see the corresponding guide on How to... Configure SAP Business Technology Platform for CTS.

For hybrid scenarios, SAP Cloud Transport Management is integrated into change and deployment management capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM (blog post). Also, SAP Cloud Transport Management (and enhanced Change and Transport System) can be integrated into SAP Solution Manager Change Request Management (ChaRM) and Quality Gate Management (QGM), such as described for SAP Cloud Transport Management in this blog post.

To gain more insights on the interplay and positioning of SAP Cloud Transport Management, CTS+ and ChaRM/QGM, also see this blog post.

 

Integrate & Test

Cloud Integration Automation Service is a unified framework for the integration of cloud solutions from SAP. It offers a selection of integration scenario and configuration targets via SAP Maintenance Planner. You can generate guided, standardized and role-based workflows, which are partially automated. The workflows will reuse the Planning and Landscape information accessible from within SAP Maintenance Planner.

With this integration service, the manual effort for the integration of available scenarios is significantly reduced.

See also the following Cloud Integration Automation blog post.

 

Operate & Monitor

SAP Cloud ALM is the central operations platform of SAP Business Technology Platform - for more information, see SAP Cloud ALM for Operations.

For this, SAP Cloud ALM works together with local operations expert tools from SAP Business Technology Platform. For example:

  • Use SAP Cloud Logging service to store, visualize and analyze application logs, metrics, and traces from your SAP BTP runtime environments. 
  • Use SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP to subscribe to events from SAP Business Technology Platform (such as from used services), from hyperscalers, from other third-party sources, or by coming up with custom alerts from your own applications. 
  • To reduce manual efforts, consider the SAP Automation Pilot service to automate regular recurring operation tasks around the lifecycle management of your apps running on SAP Business Technology Platform, such as for daily operation tasks or alert remediation. These automated tasks can then be triggered as recommended actions from SAP Cloud ALM.