DevOps for SAP drives true business value through enabling faster innovation through SAP on AWS. It requires a new way of thinking and working. This is often a challenge and Lemongrass offers this in a ‘DevOps as a Service’ model. This will enable you to get started, fast, and when ready take full control.
Getting the full benefits from running SAP on AWS requires a lot more than just an infrastructure migration. True, 40 – 70% of infrastructure, operation, and maintenance cost savings can be achieved by just doing that: migrate. And in particular, as most migrations go beyond “just lift and shift” by migrating to a different database and O/S as well as re-designing SAP in an optimized way for AWS.
Most organizations spend in excess of 50% of their IT budget on “keeping the lights on”. Add in the fact the majority of systems are non-production and used on an ad-hoc basis and you can quickly see that a lot of time and money is consumed on maintaining something which adds no value to the organization.
Moving to a DevOps for SAP landscape enables organizations to build systems and system landscapes in just hours. And as a result of the ‘near infinite’ capacity of the AWS cloud, this does not require weeks or months of planning. And as the system build can be fully automated, they can be started by anybody which releases immediate benefits.
DevOps as a Service
To capitalize on the immediate benefits this new DevOps approach can bring requires a different way of thinking and working.
As we all know, “visualizing” how something that is really new and different can work without the experience of having done it before is difficult. This often stops innovation from happening, from it being operationalized.
In addition, we see a lot of Release Manager roles within our SAP customers being fulfilled by independent consultants.
Often the challenge with moving to an agile way of working with SAP is more than just the technology, with items that took weeks now taking hours and financials calculated to the hour. Organizations need to adjust their way of working and governance processes to ensure that old-world processes do not choke.
This is why we offer DevOps as a Service. We implement DevOps tools and procedures for our customers and enable deployment on a “cost per call off” basis. Once the customer has gained experience and is becoming comfortable, we can hand the fully enabled service back.
This releases immediate benefits
- Projects Enabled on Demand: Rather than stacking all innovations up behind the large programmes of change, as is often the case, we can give each innovation its own project environment. Projects are able to start and complete at their own pace and once agreed criteria are met, the innovation can be released into the formal release track to production. This approach fundamentally speeds up the pace of innovation, reducing the critical ‘time to market’.
- Non-Production on Demand: Being able to provision system on in under an hour ensures means you only enable systems when you need them. Schedule systems down for when you’re not using them overnight or weekends, and when you’re done, simply decommission them.
- Latest Production Template: As systems are built from the latest production image gone are the days of needing to constantly run non-production refreshes, you are always running your project, PoC or training system on the latest production image so developments and updates can safely be released back into your Production release track with near-zero defects.
The Lemongrass DevOps-for-SAP Service is specifically designed to help you break, avoid this logjams: using our Lemongrass Cloud Platform you can manage your SAP Landscape with AWS to ensure that every initiative can get access to a development environment when they need it. Once build is completed, Lemongrass Cloud Platform ensures the changes are tested for conflicts and regressive impacts, and then moved safely into Production. This has the key benefits of:
- Environments can be provisioned in hours rather than weeks
- All project costs are tagged, and real-time financially tracked to the Project Code (you can see exactly who is spending what)
- Ability to run as many parallel Environments as needed – there is no ceiling.
- Environments can be deleted once the Project joins the release removing all operational costs as soon as the activity is completed.
To assist with this, we offer a Release Manager option, who can add the additional services to assist you get started with managing your DevOps enabled SAP landscape:
- Release Control
- Document your DevOps for SAP Release Strategy
- Training your Team on the DevOps for SAP Release Strategy
- Confirm Initiation of Project
- Quality Check Projects attempting to get into a new Release
- Quality Check Testing of Release
- Coordinate Final Cutover
- Environment Control
- Provision Environments per Project on request
- Provide AWS Tagging strategies and templates to align with your organisational financial reporting.
- Innovation updates:
- Our Lemongrass Cloud Platform is constantly evolving with new features released weekly, building on the existing DevOps enabled features such as automated system hygiene including system, refreshes, copies and Near Zero downtime system patching and maintenance.
By adopting DevOps-for-SAP will not only let you evolve beyond the classical waterfall SAP Release Strategy. It will help speed up your releases, deliver more work faster, and start to encourage a culture of innovation around the SAP team.
For more information contact us info@lemongrasscloud.com or +44 (0) 844 357 7863
