This DevOps Workbench was developed initially for BTP on NEO (SAP Cloud Platform-NEO). but is being extended to cover BTP on CloudFoundry also. Note: BTP was formally know as SCP.
The Problem
SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) is a one stop solution providing a technology response to a business problem. A challenge for the delivery team is the various usability intricacies which exist with the environment when supporting large scale solutions. A familiar problem encountered across the user community is the disparity and manual effort required in the deployment process for different components, e.g. a HTML5 component vs Java Compute Unit (JCU) component. Today’s software industry demands a more automated, agile and risk adverse approach to such tasks allowing focus to be directed to higher value-add tasks.
The Solution
Our team of consultants have delivered a first class tailored solution for BTP-NEO** to overcome the main pain points that our research and experience has identified. ODW is a deployment workbench which brings true CI/CD to BTP. It encompasses tools to assist and support delivery teams in the following areas:
Deployment Process
- Deploy dependant components as a package (i.e. project/sprint release) or as a single component.
- Schedule deployments – beneficial when a deployment must be done outside business hours or for multi time zone support.
- Custom UI to show the status of the deployments.
Integration with DevOps
- Developed as a package of API’s/UI’s this flexible tool can be easily integrated with other DevOps tools, e.g. trigger deployments as part of a DevOps pipeline. Its various features can also be triggered by other tools like SNOW (ServiceNOW).
Supported components
The first selection of components supported has been based on components which change the most and so automation yields the most benefits
| Component | Status |
|---|---|
| HTML5 Applications |  |
| HTML5 Applications (Cloud Foundry) | |
| JCU Components | |
| API Management (new) | |
| Portals | |
| Tomcat Components (On-premise) | |
| Full Tracking (Audit Trail) | |
| Group Dependent Components (i.e Portal and HTML5) | |
| Out of Hours Deployments (Scheduled / Unattended) * | |
| Replace Deployment Documentation | |
| Destinations | In Progress |
| Dependencies (Sap Transport) | In Progress |
*In testing
Analysis – Tools
Currently support personnel must have an ID in each of the target tenants to be able to see such things as logs (i.e. OData Provisioning). This means accounts have to maintained and there is no concept of a read-only role. With our solution support personnel can view information across all tenants without the need to have an ID in each of them. Our tool provides information on the following information through a custom UI:
- Display OData Provisioning Errors – View Errors in the selected target tenant. All error details are displayed including a stack trace.
- Display Trust Group Mapping – View Trust Group Mapping in selected target tenant.
- Display Destinations – View access to details on console level destinations in the selected target tenant.
- HTML5 Applications – View details on HTML5 applications in thee selected target tenant. Includes version, active status and URL.
- User Status – Backend SAP user status if target system, including lock status etc.
**Currently this is working on SCP-NEO but development supporting SCP-CloudFoundry is in beta.