Appearance
Deliver & Change
In the delivery phase, you want to propagate the increment (that is, the release candidate of your new app or a new version of an existing app) towards your production environment, so that your end users can start adopting it.
Continuous Delivery
One straight-forward approach is to extend your Continuous Integration pipeline by Continuous Delivery, where the propagation of your increment gets triggered by the pipeline (automatically or with manual approval), if the result of the automated tests being part of the pipeline is as desired.
Transport Management
Especially in enterprise environments and for more complex environments, operation teams appreciate the option to apply standardized change management processes also for the cloud artefacts of their company – to add transparency on the audit trail of changes (granting clarity on who perform which changes in which production subaccount and when). Also, change management opens up the door to synchronize cloud transports with on-premise changes, in case you should have hybrid apps with close interdependencies that you have to manage. Here, transport management options come in:
| Offering | Description |
|---|---|
| SAP Cloud Transport Management service | Manage transports of development artifacts and application-specific content. |
| Enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+) | For ABAP-centric and hybrid landscapes, where you might have already a management process for your on-premise changes in place, the enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+) allows the handling of changes based on Multitarget Application (MTA) archives in SAP BTP. |
Hybrid Change Management
For hybrid changes, both approaches (CTS+ and the cloud-based SAP Cloud Transport Management service) offer the integration into change management processes running on SAP Solution Manager via Quality Gate Management (QGM) and Change Request Management (ChaRM). Prerequisite for the integration of SAP Cloud Transport Management is SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SP10. The overall high-level view and positioning is sketched in the following figure (not shown in the picture is the option to transport MTA-based changes in SAP BTP with CTS+ – however, MTA-based changes will stay the only cloud content type supported by CTS+ also in the future).
SAP Cloud Transport Management service is also integrated into change and deployment management capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM, see Integration between SAP Cloud ALM and Cloud Transport Management is now available.
Combination of Continuous Integration & Transport Management
If you want to get the best of both worlds (with a combination of CI and transport management – also already depicted above), you can also consider to differentiate between:
- A development landscape, based on Continuous Integration principles and used to verify single developer changes by an automated pipeline and
- A delivery landscape, based on strict transport management rules (such as policies, schedules and roles) and used to verify release candidate versions, where propagation towards production is typically done with manual confirmation
