Switched On: A Bowdark Podcast

The Evolution of Ops in SAP

Episode Summary

This time, James and I talked to Chris Kernaghan. Chris brings a wealth of SAP techie skills to the table, and we got some great stuff from him! He's been an SAP Mentor for over 10 years, he evangelizes in the community with cloud strategy, and thinks about crazy/magical ways to make the entire system administration process light-years better. There was simply too much deep goodness to note it entirely in the notes here - just give it a listen!

Episode Notes

Highlights

• SAP for 20 years, started out in Basis administration
• Worked at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, on how to deploy SAP in AWS (so cool)
• Became a devops lover — but ecosystem wasn’t ready. Jumped into big data instead at Mindtree, then worked with Hadoop, Vora
• Operations are 3 buckets: build, run, change
• System administrators have been somewhat underserved by UI/UX revolutions in SAP. There are hundreds of “Manage [X] Orders” Fiori apps, but no Basis apps.
• Disk space and start/stop are low-hanging fruit in the administrative automation space

If you follow Chris on Twitter, you’ll quickly find about a hundred pics of him grinning at the camera for a selfie.

• The most mistakes happen in ops in: teams don’t have a good handle on what they’re supposed to actually do. Their purview. (If it’s not functional or code, it’s Basis).
• Currently playing with Kubernetes as development system units of build
• What should the future look like? “There isn’t one ring to rule them all.” There should be an API/set of web services that programmatically control SAP systems at the system level. From there, you can create and extend whatever you choose — then RunDeck can be used to configure a system. Prometheus can pull directly from the system.

Money Quotes

Chris

I’m having a great time, basically playing with lots of things — anything that takes my interest as long as it has an automation focus to it.

Not everything should be automated, but you have to go through that discovery process!

It’s about quality and consistency, not about speed.

The bit that’s getting really interesting is: how do we now layer in BTP?

Paul

You’re building a thing that builds things, you’re making a factory factory!