In the dynamic and rapidly evolving world of enterprise software, organizations continually seek ways to streamline their software development and deployment processes while maintaining the reliability and stability of critical systems.
Enter SAP DevOps—a transformative approach that merges software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to drive efficiency, enhance collaboration, and accelerate the delivery of high-quality software within the SAP ecosystem.
In this article, we’ll discuss the SAP DevOps ecosystem, how it helps companies across industries navigate the quest to achieve a harmonious balance between innovation and dependability, and where our team of expert SAP consultants can come in to help.
What is SAP DevOps?
SAP Development and IT Operations (DevOps) combines various technologies, processes, and practices to help organizations manage their SAP systems more effectively, reduce the time it takes to deliver new SAP applications, and manage critical business processes, such as human resources, financials, customer relationship management, and more.
SAP Development and IT Operations is particularly relevant when it comes to managing complex enterprise environments, offering comprehensive management and development tools designed to enhance the speed and quality of software delivery while ensuring the reliability and stability of the entire SAP ecosystem.
With SAP DevOps principles, companies across industries can:
- Automate software development, testing, configuration, and deployment processes to reduce manual errors and improve efficiency
- Leverage real-time feedback to identify and address errors, bottlenecks, and potential security vulnerabilities
- Facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery practices for more efficient system update and code management
- Embed customizable security measures throughout the software development lifecycle to protect sensitive business data
- Promote collaboration and communication between development and operations teams across the organization
Understanding the Four Critical SAP DevOps Principles
Here’s a closer look at the most important principles of the SAP Development and IT Operations journey:
1) Automation
DevOps involves a change in an organization supported by intelligent automation features that improve organizational capabilities, remove error-prone manual tasks, and deliver measurable business value across the entire organization.
By automating core manual processes, DevOps enables companies to focus on more value-driven tasks, measure business value, and recover from failure faster.
SAP Automation features in the DevOps approach cover the following business areas:
- Data security
- Testing
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery
- Infrastructure as a code
- Flexible system landscaping
2) Culture
With DevOps in SAP, everyone owns production, so ensuring DevOps is integrated into everyday work and collaboration is a common working practice is essential to any organization’s success.
A strong DevOps culture requires companies to build a diverse team of employees whose skills cover various disciplines and solutions, enabling balanced contributions and a collaborative environment across the entire workforce.
In a collaborative DevOps environment, employees are trusted and respected for their contributions, and a workforce dependent on shared ownership and collaboration allows individual strengths to grow over time, ensuring alignment with company objectives and industry requirements.
3) Measurement
Measurement objectives in the DevOps culture enable companies to link, balance, and manage how fast they can deliver high-quality software solutions that align business innovation and success in one solution.
With continuous monitoring of both historical and real-time data, users can accurately measure the technical health of their systems and the quality of their most critical operations, optimizing the efficiency of their development operations and enhancing product quality.
Here are a few typical areas for managing the quality of DevOps tools:
- Customer behavior and experience
- Frequency of deployment changes
- Planned vs. unplanned work
- Customer and user satisfaction
- Mean time to recovery (MTTR)
- Change success rate
- Lead time vs. number of outages
4) Sharing
By creating and optimizing core feedback loops across the SAP Development lifecycle, companies can share critical business information, gain better insight into the continuous business planning cycle, and leverage real-time feedback to improve software delivery.
While companies are continuously adopting DevOps to address key aspects of their development environment and accelerate their software development lifecycle, it’s critical to establish continuous feedback loops to align development processes with market trends over time.
DevOps sharing objectives allow users to cover the following efforts:
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous business planning
- Development and user testing
- Continuous monitoring
Navigating DevOps in Different SAP Environments
SAP DevOps improves the application development efficiencies in various SAP environments, including:
On-Premise Landscape
By applying DevOps to on-premise landscapes using development best practices, companies can install, configure, and leverage intelligent development tools, like the Git-enabled Change and Transport System (gCTS) and ABAPGit.
Users can also leverage on-premise deployment options to add continuous testing and integrating SAP development workflow and enable more efficient application development and better collaboration across teams.
Cloud Landscape
SAP enables users to follow industry best practices and expert guidelines to integrate DevOps methodologies into their existing SAP cloud landscape and run complex DevOps cloud frameworks in their SAP BTP platform or ABAP environment.
Hybrid Landscape
DevOps enables companies with hybrid SAP systems to leverage the SAP Solution Manager, SAP Cloud Transport Management, and SAP Cloud ALM solutions to improve continuous delivery and integration and deliver applications and services across the entire organization.
List of Common DevOps Tools for Continuous Integration
- Git: An open-source code management tool and source code repository that merges code, creates code branches, and tracks code changes over time.
- Nagios: A monitoring tool used to monitor and track system performance.
- Puppet: A configuration management tool designed to manage complex server configurations.
- Jenkins: A build server used to build, automate, and deploy new cloud solutions and tools.
- Splunk: A log management tool designed for collecting and analyzing log data.
- Chef: A configuration management tool used to manage other server configurations.
- Ansible: A process orchestration tool designed to automate the complete deployment process.
Key Considerations for DevOps in the SAP Landscape
Here are a few things to keep in mind when applying DevOps to an existing SAP landscape:
Chain of Integration
The fully integrated DevOps workflow provides various intelligent, interconnected tools to achieve critical business objectives and facilitate better collaboration across the entire SAP landscape.
Organizations can build self-functional teams and create replicas of continuous integration and continuous delivery of technological stacks to improve process automation, enhance the flow of critical software development objectives, and promote collaboration across an end-to-end software development lifecycle.
Process Automation
A complex SAP landscape structure often requires intelligent process automation tools in a few specific use cases, including coding conflicts, system overwrites, and transport sequencing and deployment. Users can leverage SAP Automation tools to maintain system speed, ensure continuous delivery, and deliver high-quality applications over time.
Flexible Foundation
SAP DevOps is built on an agile development foundation, enabling organizations to design, develop, and deploy intelligent applications and scale their SAP solutions to meet critical business objectives.
With agile development capabilities, DevOps allows users to deliver new applications, modify existing ones, build configurations and other security tools, and facilitate the end-to-end creation of a comprehensive SAP development environment.
Continuous Delivery
DevOps enables the continuous delivery and movement of software enhancements to efficiently deploy new applications and achieve a continuous management flow across systems.
By leveraging intelligent DevOps functionality, companies can deliver, deploy, integrate, and improve SAP solutions in the existing production environment.
Top 5 Advantages of DevOps with SAP Solutions
Here’s a closer look at the main advantages of DevOps with SAP:
Accelerated Software Delivery:
DevOps practices, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), enable users to rapidly deliver software updates and new features, respond quickly to market demands, improve time-to-market, and remain competitive in an evolving market.
Enhanced Reliability and Stability:
As DevOps incorporates continuous monitoring practices, companies can enhance the reliability of their SAP technologies, access real-time feedback to proactively identify and resolve issues, and reduce overall system downtime.
Improved Collaboration and Communication:
DevOps fosters cross-functional collaboration and communication between traditionally siloed teams and enhances transparency, shared responsibilities, and improved understanding of each other’s roles, leading to more efficient workflows and improved efficiency.
Flexibility and Adaptability:
The enhanced scalability of DevOps practices allows organizations to scale their software delivery processes to meet the demands of their evolving SAP landscapes, industry requirements, and dynamic workloads.
Increased Efficiency through Automation:
DevOps encourages automating repetitive and manual tasks like testing, deployment, and configuration management to enable users to focus on higher-value activities. This leads to increased efficiency, reduced errors, and streamlined development and operations processes across the organization.
How Can We Help?
Whether you need help designing and deploying new DevOps tools like Azure DevOps and SAP BTP DevOps, additional support validating source code and integration in the SAP ABAP Test Cockpit, or just an extra hand getting started on your SAP journey, Surety Systems is here to help.
Our senior-level, US-based SAP consultant team has the knowledge, skills, and experience to handle your most critical project needs and maximize success over time.
Getting Started with Our Team
Interested in learning how to apply DevOps principles to your existing SAP environment to streamline the application deployment process and improve development efficiency? Ready to get started on a project with our team of expert SAP consultants?
Contact us today for more information!
