Scaling CI/CD Setup at SAP: From Imperative Templates to Declarative Dream
Julia Baum
Mohit Dalal
13:45 - 14:30
Uptown
Setting up a continuous delivery pipeline is one of the most important capabilities of any developer platform, and for good reasons. Who doesn't want the means to build and deploy their code without thinking much about how to do it? But tailoring the pipeline setup for a large company with around 40,000 developers from diverse acquisitions turns out to be quite a puzzle. In this presentation, we will share our journey of evolving the CI/CD setup at SAP over the past four years. We'll discuss the challenges we faced during adoption, focusing on how and why we transitioned our technology stack from an imperative template-based approach to a declarative approach using Kubernetes custom resources to represent the tools and services in a CI/CD pipeline and operators to reconcile those resources. We’ll also discuss the pitfalls of maintaining the legacy imperative-based systems alongside the newer declarative ones. By the end of this session, you'll walk away with a short practical handbook filled with tips and cautionary tales for building your own pipeline setup.