Continuous Integration (CI) systems are an essential part of the development process for modern software products. The quality demands of large enterprise software are high, since defects often affect business critical workloads at large financial impact. The market share of enterprise software largely dependents on the supported runtime environments as customer demands vary in terms of deployment infrastructure and system platform.

The CI system for SAP HANA is based on a flexible and scalable workload execution platform. The system is backed by a powerful execution graph representing automated tasks. For each task fine-grained properties can be defined, e.g., execution environment (on-premise or public cloud), system platform (x86_64, aarch64), or resource requirements. Since CI jobs often rely on data input, the execution platform comprises a data management system which transports data to the required environment and handles data retention. In addition, the CI system employs containerization as abstraction layer allowing the support of general-purpose workloads.

In this presentation we will share some of the challenges in real-world enterprise software development and highlight how the cloud-native properties of the CI system support the stringent requirements of the software development and quality processes of SAP HANA.