A comprehensive ABAP development model for the cloud age, ABAP Cloud is available in SAP S/4HANA and on SAP Business Technology Platform, serving as a key pillar in customers’ clean core and cloud journeys.
In his role as Product Lead for ABAP Cloud & RAP at SAP SE, Fabian Fellhauer oversees the ABAP Cloud development model, from Core Data Services (CDS) objects and data modeling to transaction and digital runtimes behind the programming language.
Executing these models and definitions of business applications requires work by various development teams, but “all of us are working toward the common goal of providing a very efficient, future-proof development model for our customers, as well as managing the backlog, requirements, and vision of the development model,” Fellhauer said.
At this year’s SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, Fellhauer will speak alongside Frank Jentsch, Development Executive at SAP SE, on two sessions dedicated to ABAP Cloud—one a roadmap review, the other a strategy talk, both providing insights into the integration technologies, generative AI, custom code transformation, and ABAP RESTful application programming model, among other evolving capabilities that allow ABAP Cloud to drive technical innovation.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
At last year’s SAP Sapphire, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called ABAP “the most valuable language at SAP.” It’s not the only moment at which SAP’s proprietary programming language appears to have taken on added significance across the company’s technology portfolio in recent years. What evolutions have you seen recently with ABAP in the cloud?
Of course, ABAP comes from a stateful programming model, so we had our SAP-GUIs and end-to-end integrations there, but when we’re talking about a development model in ABAP Cloud, we want to make sure the customers can build applications that can run in the cloud environment. And so, you’re talking about cloud-ready application development, meaning you need to ensure certain cloud qualities within your application development. Assisting a developer in fulfilling exactly this is the essence of ABAP.
ABAP has always aimed, in the past and today, to be a language for developers who are not deep into the technologies; when talking about cloud qualities, for example ensuring rate limitations or implementing circuit breaker strategies to make sure cloud systems are running, ABAP is not at that level of technical detail. We abstract technical complexity for our application developers, so application developers can focus on implementing the business logic, because this is needed to build business applications.
Especially with ABAP Cloud, we focus on major areas, like reducing the technical complexity to build a business application, to reduce compliance issues for business applications. Areas such as security are already covered through the ecosystem of ABAP Cloud.
We’re talking about an application development model which is intuitive, that you could directly jump in and start with a data model—because this is what your business application is made of—then having your relevant business logic on top of that by adding, for example, determinations and validations, as well as very easily integrated UI capabilities.
That development roadmap, it seems fair to say, is focused on user experience. Can you discuss how the evolution of ABAP is serving to aid customers in system upgrades and other types of technology transformation?
No one wants to model and design his own UI today, especially if we’re talking about standard software, so it’s about providing a declarative model and exposing all those capabilities to generic UIs, like Fiori elements, which is one major aspect of the end-to-end ABAP cloud development model.
We also realized that customers in the past were challenged to complete system upgrades. Upgrading to a newer ABAP version was quite cumbersome for our customers because, of course, APIs had changed in the past. Business logic and application components were changed in the past, sometimes incompatibly, which led to frustration on the customer side. Upgrades were not done so often, and this led to customers not getting the latest innovations. They were staying on on-premises environments, not completing upgrades, and not receiving new innovations.
Today, we see that customers are demanding innovations, so they can benefit from AI capabilities. The ABAP cloud development model, and those AI capabilities, are now coming at the right time, because customers are now realizing they need to upgrade to be able to catch up with the innovations in technology, and they’re seeing those technologies are integrated into ABAP Cloud—but only in newer versions.
Therefore, in our development, we’d moved to the cloud some years ago. We also made sure that customers were only able to access things that won’t harm any upgrade, that they’re only accessing released APIs, which are kept stable, which are assigned to a managed lifecycle and compatibility lifecycle. With those APIs, it’s very easy to upgrade to newer ABAP versions and to catch up with all those innovations which we are delivering in new releases.
That’s what ABAP Cloud is made of: getting those innovations into the cloud, to allow for the customer to build cloud-ready business applications but also making sure that new innovations are delivered to our customers. They do not need to stick with one software version; they’re able to do upgrades over and over again, without investing too much money on that.
What don’t people understand about ABAP Cloud that you find yourself educating SAP customers around?
What I want to emphasize is that ABAP Cloud is not an environment. We have an ABAP environment in the cloud; it’s the SAP BTP ABAP environment. But ABAP Cloud is the development model to build cloud-ready applications.
You do not need to have a cloud environment in the SAP BTP ABAP environment, for example, to use ABAP Cloud. You can also use ABAP Cloud in your on-prem environment, using S/4HANA on-premise, or in S/4HANA, private cloud, public cloud, and SAP BTP ABAP environment. You can use ABAP cloud everywhere, right? You’re able to build ABAP-based and cloud-ready applications everywhere, even if your environment which you're running on is not yet running in the cloud.
This helps customers in the transition phase to complete a migration from SAP ECC to S/4HANA on-premises, or even private cloud, and then to incrementally also transform their old extensions to a state of cloud readiness. They do not need to migrate all those extensions, but the core business processes—especially those which should also receive innovations in the future—should be migrated towards ABAP Cloud to make sure that they are ready for the future. SAP customers can already do that in non-cloud environments. This is very important to understand, and we need to emphasize it repeatedly.
ASUG recently spoke with Dr. Alexander Rother about Joule's ABAP developer capabilities, which is the type of breakthrough that doesn't happen without a deep level of collaboration between your team and others at SAP. What can you say about the collaboration between your team and especially those working on the product development roadmap for SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP S/4HANA?
We have a very tight collaboration with SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP S/4HANA. Of course, SAP S/4HANA is using ABAP; both SAP S/4HANA private and public cloud editions are running on ABAP, and they’ve done so successfully for multiple years now. Historically, R/3 ran on ABAP successfully.
Those applications built within SAP S/4HANA, which are built on the ABAP stack, are built with the ABAP Cloud development model, meaning that they build their data models with Core Data Services (CDS). They expose business objects with all data, for example, to be accessible via UI services or web API services and also are using those capabilities which are provided by ABAP Cloud, by having a declarative programming model, to be integrated into all the applications.
In discussing side-by-side solutions, especially in SAP BTP, outside of our cloud, you can also use the SAP Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model. Integration and collaboration of those programming models is strong. We do everything we need to do to make sure that applications built within ABAP Cloud or built within CAP can integrate with each other.
We are also ensuring that CAP can access ABAP-based systems; in ABAP, we also have a service-based consumption model in place, which allows you to access distributed data independently, if they’re built on CAP and any other application stack, to make those integration scenarios possible. Customers can carve out those scenarios to those stacks which are best for their use cases.
As you head into SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference this year, what else outside of your presentations are you looking forward to on the ABAP front?
I cannot predict anything, because I do not have any machine-learning algorithms in my mind. [laughs]
Recently, SAP delivered Joule developer capabilities for ABAP, which helps application developers in SAP, as well as on the customer and partner side, to accelerate their development processes, to make sure that they can build applications very quickly. This just hit our customer systems in February, so customers are now able to use those generative AI capabilities to speed up the development process. I'm looking forward to getting first feedback from customers, and to shape with our customers the future roadmap for those generative AI capabilities within our ABAP Cloud development model.
I’m planning to have an influence session, on Wednesday of SAP Sapphire, where we also discuss, together with customers, the strategy on clean core extensibility, especially in the private cloud edition, where we want to make sure we understand what roadblocks exist for customers to adapt ABAP Cloud, and how can we build AI-based features to accelerate the development for our customers.
This is a core topic within 2025 right: making sure we incorporate AI functionalities, when it is possible, in development processes and within our programming model to make business user scenarios even more efficient. We have a lot of topics in the pipeline, which are currently under implementation, which are also coming this year, so stay tuned for that. I recommend attending our roadmap session, because there we are going into detail on which AI-based features are just around the corner.
Don’t miss Fabian Fellhauer and Frank Jentsch’s sessions at SAP Sapphire (Examine the road map for ABAP Cloud - BTP2669, on Tuesday, May 20, 1-1:40 p.m. EDT; and ABAP Cloud driven by generative AI - BTP2668, on Tuesday, May 20, 4:00-4:40 p.m. EDT.)