This is a blog post that tells how easily one organization at SAP uses the HANA Cloud Platform - SAP's cloud solution - to build amazing software. But first, I want to share a little bit of my history with you so that you understand how actually everything came together.
It was about end of 2012 when I got out of the plane in New York City and headed my way to Philadelphia to start an internship in a team called Global IT Mobile Center of Excellence. I still was in the middle of my master studies and had an interview with Martin Lang head of the department, a few months earlier. We were meeting in the training center in Walldorf (building 5) and except me telling him about my goals, strength, etc. he just couldn't stop telling me about all the apps his department had created. He was so excited about it when he for example showed me the Asset Tag app. A mobile app that employees can use to scan any SAP barcode, no matter if it's sticked on a mobile phone, a desktop or some cable, and instantly can see who is owning this equipment, where it belongs to and so on. Instantly and from anywhere in the world. He was really excited about it and so was I to start as an intern in his team.
The question now is: What should be my part in this department? I've never done any iOS or Android development. I was feeling home in the web technology area but also had a great deal of backend knowledge and wanted to apply my knowledge somehow.
So I started my internship in Philadelphia and it was shortly before Christmas when John Astill, at that time a member of Martin's team, approached me and told me about this NetWeaver Cloud thing. Basically AWS or Microsoft Azure, but just from SAP. I've never developed in the cloud before, so you can imagine that I was a little hesitant in the beginning. Unfortunately, John isn't the type of guy who takes a "maybe". He gave me an example project, developed by Julia Lakatos and Johannes Riedel, a simple chat app called "Twaddle". It was a prototype for testing Apple push notifications in the cloud (developed in Java) - and as you can image it worked. He said I should just start on that and get familiar with the workbench.
This was the moment the magic happened: I installed the NetWeaver Cloud tools on my Eclipse, imported the "Twaddle" project and that was it - I was already able to deploy an application to the cloud with a few mouse clicks. I was stunned. I mean, I developed for SAP and other companies before, and usually you first have to setup some server environment, configure it, no matter which technology and then you somehow need to have a process so that your files get transported to the server (or at least need to upload it via ftp). And now this. Right-click: Deploy. Right-click: Restart. That's it, that's all.
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the cloud.
Literally deploying an application in the clouds at 39,000 feet.
Since then a lot of stuff happened. SAP renamed NetWeaver Cloud to HANA Cloud Platform and started rolling out new features on a 2-weeks basis. After my internship I finished my master thesis in the other half of Martin's team in Germany and since 2014 I'm a full time employee and proud to still be in Martin's organization which became so big that it actually had to be split up into two departments: IT Enterprise Mobility and IT Platform Center of Excellence, lead by Florian Heretsch. Also some former Sybase colleagues from Dublin, California joined our team (lead by Lisa Brown) and develop apps with us together.
Today almost every backend we use for our mobile apps runs on HANA Cloud Platform. Right now, we are having 44.000+ unique users every month (inside SAP!) with almost a quarter of a million hits. And it gets more every month.
Also from the HANA Cloud side a lot of things changed, improved and were introduced. HANA Cloud now offers a lot of different services, like a persistence service for data storage, a document service for file storage, and so on. Right now, there are more than 20 services you can instantly use by using HANA Cloud Platform. Also, the community grew a lot. You can find tons of resources, articles, blog posts and support about how to develop applications on HANA Cloud. But once you started developing an application, deployed it to the cloud and want to become more serious, the next important question comes to your mind:
How do you do the operations in the cloud?
Just developing an app and deploying it to the cloud isn't something you would call a rock-solid operations concept. There is no quality control, no testing, no security checks, nothing. Nevertheless, we are still using HANA Cloud Platform on a daily basis. So how do we do it?
The magic word here is: Continuous Integration. We managed it to find a really good way to work together across countries and across time-zones by using Git and GitHub. We drive a test-first approach in development to ensure high code quality. We have automated builds by using a Bamboo build server so that we can test the latest code anytime we want. And we even managed it to have a 3-tier landscape in the cloud with defined access rights and 24/7 support.
The great part here is: Even though we started following processes and defined workflows, everyone is still happy. It's special, because creating and following processes usually isn't something that is related to happiness. Our developers are happy, because they are still very flexible and have all the tools they need to be productive and to roll out new software very fast. Our managers are happy because they get really early results and can immediately see how an app is going to look like (by using a scrum-like agile development approach). And most important our users are happy, because they get good and solid software that can be accessed from anywhere in the world and that is always available.
So, if you are interested in knowing how we do this, how we do development and operations and how you can do this in your organization then join us at TechEd in Barcelona! As Business Innovation & IT some of our team, including Martin Lang and myself, will be there and show you how we use HANA Cloud Platform and other productive tools in our daily work to do what we do best: Building great software - in the cloud. We're looking forward talking to you!