Any respectable rock concert has an opening act and SAP TechEd conference has an opener in the form of SAP Devtoberfest. If you missed the live developer dance-offs and geek-outery that’s been going on there, check out the event’s GitHub page. More buttoned-up part of the event included “themed” weeks: development best practices, Security, Cloud, Analytics, and front-end development.
Even if your reaction to the theme “Cloud-native in the SAP world” is a reflective eye-roll, I highly recommend two presentations from that week: Microservices are Probably Not What You Think They Are and Pour Some Serverless On Me.
These days it’s hard to tell what is a buzzword and what actually matters. Unlike SAP Leonardo (RIP), microservice architecture is the thing that SAP developers should be paying attention to. No matter how long SAP continues to maintain on-premise ERP systems, the future of development is Cloud or, at minimum, hybrid. And microservice architecture plays a significant role in it.
My two main takeaways from the presentation were:
- not to confuse re-use with decoupling;
- “microservices maximize speed, not cost”.
We might think that a function module is something like a “microservice” in ABAP but it’s simply not. The decoupling technique in the demo felt counter-intuitive, almost foreign to a traditional developer. This means that using microservices will mean not just things to learn but things to un-learn as well. JP
Don’t miss our latest issue!
Boring Enterprise Nerds 