Can you do DevOps in SAP? - Chris Kernaghan

my name is Chris Kernan and today I'm going to talk to you about doing DevOps in SA P Mouse gifts so a little bit about me I am a husband and father I'm this t-shirt today my daughter is wearing the other one which is apprentice so I promised I would wear this for her I'm also an SAT mentor so I exist with a group of people who represent the top 1% of influencers within the SI p ecosystem I work as the regional CEO we leave for database and Technology for brief installations as part of my tree I'm really really lucky that my job I fulfills all my passions because the SI p technology platforms are actually quite diverse so it's actually really cool my journey in DevOps started five years ago and it's all the fault of a good friend of mine called Simon McCartney and what I'd really really like is his Twitter handles down there and if somebody would tweet him and say it's all your fault that I'm listening to some crazy Irish dude talking about their safety and DevOps that would be awesome because it's like 9 o'clock his time and he would get a kick out of it but I spent 4 years out of the last 5 trying to convince people in the AAP ecosystem that I wasn't mad and it's only been in the last year the people of actually started to come back and go you may have been right ok which is the nice feeling but it still took four years to get there so here's the background of my ecosystem so si P is probably the biggest company software company the people haven't heard of ok it is I think it's number 3 in the world in terms of software development it has any 5000 employees in a market capitalization of 116 billion euros and it's famous for or not so famous for running the world so depending on the metric she or he listened to 75 to 80% of the world's financial transactions touch an SI p system somewhere in their lifecycle 95% of the world automotive manufacturers similar of oil companies the one I love is like 85% of the world's Brewers over on sa P which is great and 80% of the world's chocolate manufacturers as well the company that I worked for blue stood in mind tree so Lutheran was started in 2002 MindTree in 1999 rieflin was acquired by mine tree in August 2015 bluefin is famous for pushing the boundaries of sa P technology so when I say P want to be something really challenging as a demo or a keynote or with a partner they come and speak to us and we've we've been doing that great work for you for ages and mine tree is actually famous for running the isère platform for Microsoft so this is the this is the opposite SIA T of presentation idea of about a month ago in our industry conference and I was bringing DevOps again to to the ASAP community and trying to teach them and show them what DevOps is why it's important why it's really cool and what they kinky and from adopting it what I'm here today that all you nice people is you know how do we introduce to have upstairs AP teams and get them started because I've seen so many of the names on people's badges and these are all s ap customers so you know I've talked to people you know Disney for example or NetApp or you know Lockheed Martin you know these companies run sa P these you know these sa P systems you know they run finance they run HR they run warehouse management production planning seals and distribution from these systems but they don't know about the secret system okay so I can how do we introduce DevOps to your s AP teams and get them started because we are starting this journey from practically zero okay so age develops possible NSA P okay DevOps and our safety is hard okay I think we all know that DevOps is hard we've all heard you know many reasons why DevOps is hard culture is a big one but the that's the sa Pico systems really starting from scratch I'm gonna put it out there and say DevOps and I say P is hard okay so over the last four years I've spent a lot of time with customers trying to bring them along and I've distilled it into four messages four key areas that really challenge them a lot in the first ones culture okay and I'm not gonna leave our culture too much because I think we all knew the culture is really really hard but I do talk to them about what is culture and hide his culture and Nia Boulder bumps and white tools are not the be-all and end-all of their homes okay see icd pipelines what is the CIC D pipeline and why is it important how does it increase the velocity of change without increasing risk automation what are you mean by automation what can we automate and why it doesn't necessarily mean that lots of people are going to lose their jobs okay and measurement you know what do we measure why do we measure how do we use those feedback loops to make our processes better to make our software better to make our lives better improve the quality of our lives so why is DevOps a necessity why is devil so hard mispronounce it well ICP isn't just one technology it's actually six distinct technology stacks all packaged as incoming from one company so we have about which is our proprietary platform it's a 4gl line we age at wrong you know it's a business process language we have things like Business Objects which is our reporting and consumption layer are one of them again we have Hana which is our in memory database platform that encompasses a columnar and memory database a web server data science predictive algorithms always create things we have a j2ee compliant stack called netweaver java which won't you know you which is really annoying because you can't run anything on it except there's AP applications we've embraced javascript for our UI 5 front-end and we also have a cloud platform which is a Java platform we also have multiple UI and new axis our user experience so we have the proprietary si pqe hands up who has actually entered travel and expenses on an SI p system anybody you knew that that user experience is not great it's not real okay we have access we have office tools like business Explorer analysis for office for reporting we have a consumption layer called web UI we use html5 and then we have a set of design guidelines called fury we've so many different moving parts ok so we have different application architectures and we also don't have a single unified development toolset which makes stuff really hard although I was in the the mainframe session and I was listening to the the the nice lady from IBM and it was actually really interesting was they didn't unify their development till so what they did was they provided a tool that what I see do the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline instead unlinked it into all those development platforms it's actually really smart but those are all reasons that lots of people lots of different places and technology have issues with but why is it actually so hard on SAT well s if he's special we're special we're snowflakes ok normally we don't sit under the direct remit of IT we consume IT services but we don't sit underneath IT quite often ok a lot of my customers have multiple vendors so were other parts of tech other parts of IT through technology of problems to scale and increase reliability ok ASAP through people you've heard of Business Process Outsourcing and things again so it's not unusual for very large companies to have multiple vendors serving and supporting their SP technology so an example I work for a customer they have HP looking after the infrastructure that sits in the data center they have emphasis supporting the technical runtime of the application and the data bases and then they have I don't know IBM supporting the application ok so it's really difficult to get these people to align on the values and start to thump DevOps processes because there could be commercial implications to each of them to each of those different vendors okay the next two are sort of aligned in the fight s ap created a concept called netweaver certified the problem with netweaver certified as it keeps resolving problems that are already fixed so if we take monitoring for example okay or deployment within monitoring we have a great tool called solution manager fabulous to really like it so they take the implement really really cool and one of the things that it does is it monitors the system and collect all this information okay we have pivot as well for example from IBM but we also have open source technologies that we can use like Nagios or sensu which have plug-ins for s AP and many of the companies that I work with other parts of the business you use Nagios and sensi and things like that but the s AP people won't let them use the tools on their s AP landscapes why it's not that Weaver certified ok so culture so what do we need to learn about culture in the SI PQ system we need to change our attitude to failure now when we have multiple vendors all incentivized with commercial agreements that punish failure it's really difficult to get them to change the mindset around failure we also over-engineer solutions to try and beat off you know the mean time between failure ok what we need to look at is mean time to recovery you know we saw in one of the one of the first presentations on Monday was the three-tier support model that is absolute ingrian and that's a pain we don't you know we don't use things like swarming and things that can push the ability to solve the problem closer actually to the problem we tend to move back up the stack ok in terms of collaboration many of these organizations and sources because because I say P support is off to one side and not with NIT we're not truly multidisciplinary and we're not P shift employees we're t-shaped within the sa peak which system but not really outside of that top-down permission again many of the companies that I've talked if I get the idea of DevOps and why they want to do it and why it's important and then the people at the bottom get it as well but the squishy layer in the middle those managers who either on the customer side or in charge of the ASAP landscape and measured against business SLA and the multiple vendors that they're working with and the commercial agreements and the SLA s that they're working to it's really really difficult to change this culture so it is an invaluable einman t' again when you have multiple vendors pulling in different directions it's really hard to get them the align to the values of what the company what the customer is trying to get through in terms of tools since we don't have a consistent set of tools across the different parts of sa inyo I work in sa clean landscapes and you know I have as a technical consultant I'm working with Hannah's a database I'm working with the a Bob stock is a business transaction layer I'm working with Business Objects as a reporting layer I'm working with mobile guys working on ui5 and mobile deployments and there's no unified toolset across each of those people so it's really difficult for me to find a common language with these people you really have to work hard and I can do that because I'm usually with these people but when I'm working with people here are four or five thousand miles away getting that connection getting that understanding is really really difficult okay and in community we have a really vibrant community we have a fabulous community nobody really really strong but we don't share enough okay and we do have create empathy so moving on the CI CD pipelines so continuous integration continuous and delivery it's NSA P is hard okay that's wrong that's statements factually incorrect okay this is what it should be continuous integration and delivery and about is hard because we come across so many technology stacks saying in Sapa is hard is wrong you i-5 is JavaScript really you can do continuous integration really easily well really easy if you know what I mean compare the about okay anything that I say is easy I'm comparing it to a bar okay so just bear with me okay but it is hard so when you look at the properties of CI CV you can see on the table there what appears on the left hand of the far right more than anything else about its reeyou the unit test tool that we have an about sucks really sucks okay the the regular merge the trunk sucks because branch based development is really expensive Inaba and I'll go through that in a minute all of mir the testing and Alabam is really difficult as well because of the proprietary nature of the south GUI technology so so what are the property so one of the great things is we have a single code line and above so everything that you do in development you go right the way through to production we don't tend to do branch based development because it's really expensive because in order to do it you actually need a whole copy of the the ASAP system to do that branch based development we don't do local base development because the IDE and the code repository is in the air safety in the app system itself I've got to keep saying out up okay and the other thing is when we see of an activate a function we don't have the concept of feature flight so once you I see activate the change it's there and it's active across your whole landscape tools this one's really interesting for me because we have had this grid ability to deploy change for the last 20 25 years and it's automatic but what's interesting about it is the smallest unit of change when you're doing JavaScript development for example is a commit you know I get commits or if you're doing sequel development it's a secret okay so it could be one line of code it could be hundreds of lines code NSA and now about the smallest unit of cheese that we have as a transport and our transport could be one object one line of code it could be hundreds it could be thousands okay so the smaller so when we actually look at the size of the unit of change the larger the unit of change the greater the risk okay the SI pqe technology it's actually really difficult to automate because it's proprietary it's a proprietary front-end it's not a web front-end it doesn't have an API or anything like out there it just doesn't work particularly well the app stack does have api's but when you're starting to look at reports and the running of reports through the GUI you can't use the API you have to use the GUI layer okay and people don't use the tools very much so as I said the the a Bob unit the the a Bob unit tests film people don't use it enough so the feedback loop back the SAPD improve the tool doesn't get triggered so in languages and in testing generating test it is really hard because I say because the al-bab stack comes across so many areas of the business here char finance production planning warehouse management seals and distribution there are graph relationships in the data model itself but when you're looking at the other model that encompasses tens of thousands of tables generating test data in that environment is really hard ok and testing is really hard there's a reason why we have an entire ecosystem based our own testing and it's not baked into our development process as well but how can you do CC ICD pipeline in SA P ok so you can use the the ABAB unit the unit testing tool as i said we have a tool called solution manager comes called computer-based testing automation which will through this whole end and test going right from the back end through the front and in the mobile in the reporting layers and things yeah it's fabulous and then within our cloud platform as I said we have DevOps tools because it's a Java beers and JavaScript piaced runtime environment they have a whole section set aside for Jenkins and cucumber and things accountant selenium and again with our front with our new front end and ui5 our JavaScript front-end we have web testing tools as well so that you can do these things it's just the people are choosing not to do them okay for those reasons I said before so automation so why don't we order me at much okay per tools so the ASAP tools are not built for autumn are for integration and other automation tools it integrates really well in the solution manager what it doesn't integrate and in the other tools so when I take for example environment provisioning okay the SSAT way supported way to build your environment is to use what's known as to solve for provisioning manager now I can build a bash script that will install a Business Objects server or a netweaver Java server or a nav app server but it's not the supported way to actually install the system ok I also can't script that software provisioning manager to any great degree and link that to something like chef or puppet ok I can't do that particularly easily there's a lack of trust people don't trust the test automation ok especially in compliant environments they would rather be hands on the keyboard actually doing it so they can verify it ok skill we keep trying to boil the ocean we're not starting small because of the way the ASAP system itself cuts across so many business functions it's really difficult to take an isolated area of the business and test these you know our DevOps process our DevOps processes ok and in job protection as I said we outsource an awful lot of our s ap activities and support to other economies ok so there's a lot of people who potentially could be out of work but what can we automate so this is stuff that I bought emitted in the past and the varying degrees of complexity so I've done server built I've done server built and Amazon and Google in his urn on premise you see VMware great fun really really you know really enjoyed it change change movement so the ability to move change three landscapes automatically moving onto things and medium complexity monitoring and alerting moving on to higher complexity stuff like regression test packs so using tools like loadrunner or HP QC or again solution manager to automate these things well it's really hard so this and then environment provisioning as well so in terms of measurement you know the five w of who what where why when evaluation so setting thresholds evaluating security and compliance evaluating information use that stuff we do really well my stuff we do really really well but we don't do particularly well is actually analyze that gaining insight pattern recognition seeing do we see the same problems at the same time every month do we have the same problems at month end do programs feel at the same time those types of things and then because we don't do that in sites tab it becomes really difficult to actually to do conclusions to actually improve the run of the system you know for many people close enough is good enough but it's not really we have to continuously improve and again when we get into this multi-vendor environment because different parts of different organizations are in charge of different parts of the ASAP system it's really difficult for other companies to say to their counterparts in those other organizations we've seen this in your system we've seen this in this part of the system can you fix it the other the other vendor came quite helped me go no i've new commercial agreement with you why would i want to go down so so we have a tool as i said a solution manager and it's awesome you know I've seen too many slides with so many moving parts on see ICD pipelines you know Jenkins jira get all those sorts of things in their grid I actually have a single application a single monolithic stack that'll monitor my application and the end it'll be version control for me it'll be change management for me it'll be incident management for me and it's all there in one data model that I can then report from and do that insight and analysis really really easily and support it much much more effectively than those 10 or 15 moving parts it's just a pig the implement no really is it is it sucks service I love it but it sucks so yes so so so here's some of the interesting things that I love to measure so I love tracking developers I'm an infrastructure guy an Operations guy I love monitoring what developers get up to so when they actually start to deploy code you look at the return codes and I used to run a competition with on one project the developer who got the lowest total return codes or most successful changes through in the week one I'm the one who got the worst changes three and the week had the buy kick so every Friday we had kick and somebody had to buy it it was awesome that's great we monitor things like the date of your size okay which doesn't seem like a great metric but when you're working with an in-memory database that's constrained by its hardware are you absolutely have to monitor the database eyes otherwise you're gonna start to run out of memory and the system's gonna crash stuff we monitor and medium complexity your the number of successful test runs I get monitor than three solution manager the number of high utilization users okay I'm the number of programmers that we gather and in terms of high complexity I give you some really really cool stuff for predicting the load of a process so when you get the quarter and month and year end you know customers are typically running really really heavy stuff okay I can go back using tools acceleration manager and I actually pick out all the performance information for that time run some predictive against it and then predict how much Lu democracy going to need on a customer and I see privation that hardware for them to make sure that they don't run and be any issues I can also do things that critic picked loot times so my ask the purpose of what this of all is listed it I I knew that it sounds very very negative her house sounded quite negative as I've gone along you know we don't do this we don't do that what I actually want to do is to help you people to help you all when you're having conversations within your organization with the special s AP department I actually understand where they're coming from to try and help build that common line we can give you the ideas and the knowledge or a brief introductions of the knowledge of things like the above stack and wire to challenge your most of the ASAP customers run a bob so that it's the whole type it's the one that you know when people say are you we run sa P they're probably talking about the album stack okay so when you go and speak to these people new your CIO where your CEO says right we need to do DevOps and they get everybody in a room I'm the SAT manager sitting there and he's going we can't do that you can actually go bail actually do you run ui5 yes we do well then you can do you run Hana yes okay there's another but do you run about yes okay we'll leave how about for the time being and we'll concentrate on everything else and make it working okay so I what I wanted to do is help you help them find a common language common understanding okay help cross train teams we are famously myopic because we come across such a large suite of Technology there's so much for us to learn we don't see what everybody else is doing okay show us the possibilities show us what you have done she was what you gain from it you know every slide that I've seen up here over the last number of days at house we managed to decrease our error it by this and increase our crew deployment by this I've taken a picture of it so I can take it into my customers and go see this is what you can do and also teaches about culture teachers hard to share better teaches how to you know do these things show us the culture she was hardly embrace failure and she was a when we say feel fast we don't mean feel fast in production we mean feel early in our process and how we can feel early in our process and that's me thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: IT Revolution

Views: 7,308

Keywords: IT Revolution, does17 san francisco, continuous delivery, DOES17, Agile, enterprise, software delivery, information technology, Bluefin, development, Lean, DevOps, devops training, executive, devops tutorial, SAP, operations, software, does17 us, what is devops, IT, DevOps Enterprise Summit

Id: GSS4RHqUeig

Length: 26min 45sec (1605 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2017