What's new for SAP BTP in February 2024?

[David_Cresson]

Welcome to this second iteration of the "What's new for SAP BTP?" newsletter. I got very good feedback from the community for the first occurence, so thanks for the positive comments, and the forwarding in your network.

SAP BTP

My objective with this newsletter is to provide a quick overview what's happened during the month on the BTP area but also highlight the differents channels of information offered by SAP you can use to stay up to date. If you are reading this, you already know this channel, the SAP community 😊, I mainly used as reference on last newsletter. I already mentioned SAP BTP Innobytes, @cecihuergo forwarded me the link to her post where she maintains link to all episodes. You can also use the playlist on youtube and subscribe to the channel to get notification when new video is out. As we talk about youtube channel, you can also check the SAP Developers channel which has a huge content with various format. Last year this channel hosted the Devtoberfest event, and currently DJ Adams aka @qmacro  animates livestream on CAP. Let's close this round of table with another medium, podcast, with SAP BTP Talk podcast; we will talk about last episode on the Integration Suite section.

@thomas_volmering provides good highlights on the SAP product stragegy in the developpement, automation and integration areas. It gives a nice overview on how all the new features on  the low code/no code suite SAP Build, the new family member SAP Build  Code, and the improvement on Integration Suite will help in this strategy and how these solutions are intercomplementary. Finally, IA is the center of discussions for last months, so how to talk about product strategy without mentioning how the generative IA will provide added value on these services.

In the newsletter format, I can also mention the blog post of @Stephanie_Stang on the BTP updates happened on Q42023.

Finally, we close the general update on BTP with the release of the new BTP Repository Diagram.

SAP BTP ABAP environment

Version 2402 has been released this month. As every quarter, lot of improvments, small and big, are there.

@FlorianWahlprovided a detailled inventory of this new release in his blog post. If I would have to highlight only two functionalities, no doubt I will mention the "bring your own Git" functionality which finally offers similar option than the gCTS+ framework on S4/Hana, ie specify your own git repository used to host your software component. Beyond the fact it provides a full control on your source code, I'm pretty sure it will open new options and usages for the community. Second feature is the elastic scaling; after the hibernation last year, the elastic scaling feature is another nice feature to keep the cost under control while using the possibilities of the service at full capacity.

On blog side, @Andre_Fischer posted two interesting blogs on the creation of value help for custom and released domain fixed values which provides an alternative to the original recommandation of using custom view on CDS views DDCDS_CUSTOMER_DOMAIN_VALUE and DDCDS_CUSTOMER_DOMAIN_VALUE_T and on how to reuse access control from a released SAP CDS entity.

Cloud Management Tools

There are lot of visible changes in the services using the BTP, but the platform itself also continously evolves. Most of the time, they are silent because related to technical things behind the scene, but sometimes they are also visible for end user. This month, SAP released a big change in the "Usage Analytics" section of the BTP cockpit which is now called "Cost and Usage": all detail in this blog post.

Integration Suite

The Episode 104 of BTP Talk podcast  came back on the announcement of the Edge Integration Cell solution during TechEd last year. The guest of this podcast, @finny_babu, explains in detail what is Edge Integration Cell, what are the use cases, the difference with PO, and how to activate it...

If you prefer reading instead of listening, you can also refer to his blog post published last year.

The International Focus Group for Integration, aka IFG for integration has a monthly event for Integration Suite update. You can find previous sessions and shceduled ones for the year there.

You can find the February session recording here, where you will get updates on API Management, Event Mesh, B2B and a reminder about the upgrade of the outdated third party connector as described in the note 3001980.

Configuration Changes

Note a change is planned in March on the username and domain changes for email notifications sent for SAP Cloud Integration for data services...