Cloudify & ServiceNow: Taking Your IT-SM and DevOps to the Next Level

As a modern and forward-thinking company, you’ve invested in the latest technologies to power your business. You’ve got an excellent IT Service Management (ITSM) or DevOps toolset, and you’re now looking to take things to the next level with your operations. 

You want to merge your IT and Business teams into one cohesive unit that can drive success for both sides. You want to automate as much as possible so that services are reliable and efficient without impacting performance. You want to effectively execute your strategy by empowering employees at every level of the organization with the right tools for each task. You want to create an agile atmosphere that encourages experimentation, rewards innovation, and embraces change–all while maintaining compliance.

Why Cloudify & ServiceNow?

Scale your DevOps team without extra hires: Cloudify enables ServiceNow clients to scale efficiently without the need for extensive DevOps hiring. Rather than adding more employees, enterprises can allocate cloud resources (flows) to their on-premise workloads to accelerate development and testing.

The beauty of this integration is that you get Environment-as-a-Service Workflows that enable you to scale your DevOps team without requiring new hires. As a software company, you know the importance of agility and scalability. With these two features, Cloudify enables any enterprise with ServiceNow to adopt agile development practices like continuous integration and deployment while avoiding the traditional delays associated with new hire training, ramp-up time, and more.

Removing repeatable tasks and unproductive operations

Cloudify reduces the amount of time you spend on repeatable tasks by making them automatic. You no longer need to worry about provisioning, configuring, and managing cloud environments. It takes care of it for you, freeing up your time to focus on other essential things.

Additionally, Cloudify removes unproductive operations that are common with other orchestration tools. For example, if a process fails or is canceled, Cloudify automatically cleans up after itself by terminating all instances of affected services in the environment. This ensures that there is always a clean slate to work from when creating new environments.

Optimizing environment structures

Cloudify also provides the ability to optimize the structure of cloud environments. For example, suppose a ServiceNow user requests a DevOps team to create an environment for them. In that case, the DevOps team can use Cloudify to automate the rest of the process and deploy and configure all necessary components in seconds.

However, enterprises need more than one DevOps team to deploy and configure different parts of their environments in many cases. Cloudify provides this capability by publishing SaaS templates with specific configurations for other teams. Each template is unique and has its own set of configuration points that can be abstracted from ServiceNow. 

This ensures that each team’s configuration is correct. These configurations are published in SaaS templates for other teams to use whenever they want without knowing anything about how they work.

Keeping stakeholders delighted

Cloudify for ServiceNow provides a powerful but straightforward workflow via ServiceNow to create and deploy cloud environments. The way it works is that the user accesses the Cloudify for ServiceNow interface from within ServiceNow, then logs into their Cloudify account, and requests an environment that’s been certified by the enterprise’s cloud infrastructure, security, and DevOps teams.

The beauty of this workflow is that it eliminates the need to switch between different toolsets to request a new cloud environment. It also provides a single view of all of your requisitions and automates the approval workflows. And once approved, you’ll receive a notification in ServiceNow when your Certification environment has been deployed.

But what makes this workflow even more powerful is that it can be configured as an approval workflow. That means those granted permission within your organization can automatically deploy those environments without waiting for approval from other stakeholders—thus ensuring that those who have requested environments are delighted with their results.

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Use cases

Cloudify & ServiceNow integration delivers cloud-based enterprise DevOps practices and continuous delivery in a secure managed service so you can:

Share your certified environments in the ServiceNow service catalog: As a Cloudify customer, you can use all of its features and benefits as part of your ServiceNow deployment. ServiceNow customers who want to automate their IT environments can now enjoy the benefits of Cloudify’s cloud-based DevOps practices.

Cloudify provides pre-certified environments for your development, testing, staging, and production needs. You can use these environments to ensure that all staff members are working in the right environment at the right time. This will help decrease any confusion or mistakes that may arise because of different configurations on different machines.

This new integration also makes it easier for you to track what changes have been made to your environment without going back through logs or documentation. The ServiceNow integration logs all authorized changes made by staff members in the approval process, so you know what has been done.

Any unauthorized changes or errors will also be logged, so you know how to fix them before they have any lasting effects on your environment.

Automating infrastructure requests: delivery of authorized development, testing, and production environments

In your quest to automate your IT, you can often fall short by not providing standards for your DevOps practices. Cloudify and ServiceNow integration allow you to deliver a secure managed service, which automates infrastructure requests by providing authorized development, testing, and production environments.

Allowing your team to request infrastructure securely without any human involvement streamlines the process and provides an audit trail of all approved changes that have been made.

This also allows for pre-approved environment changes that don’t require human involvement—enabling you to get approvals from appropriate channels before moving forward with any changes.

On top of this, ServiceNow users can take advantage of the ServiceNow integration with Cloudify to share their certified environments in the ServiceNow service catalog and use them for automation and orchestration in their IT operations.

Managing approval flows to ensure that cloud operations are authorized through appropriate channels

Developers and system admins often need to make changes to the operating environment. To reduce the chances of human error and ensure that an appropriate party approves these changes, we created a request-based system for authorized change.

This automated workflow streamlines all your DevOps practices. The process requires minimal manual intervention, reduces the risk of error, and offers full traceability throughout development life cycles.

Conducting standard, pre-approved environment changes that do not require human involvement

DevOps practices can be a challenge for manufacturing organizations, which typically have a highly regulated environment. In the past, this has been a hurdle for organizations as they look to optimize their processes from development to production.

To navigate these challenges, you need to rethink how your organization does DevOps. Cloudify and ServiceNow integration empower you to automate infrastructure requests, manage approval flows, certify environments, and conduct automated standard pre-approved changes.

In a Nutshell: How Cloudify & ServiceNow Integration Works

For DevOps, IT, and Cloud teams:

·        Set up certified environments

·        Reuse existing toolchain code to create self-service environments

·        Automated scripts and templates can be imported into Cloudify

·        You can merge these into blueprints to establish your certified environments

·        Publish certified environments to ServiceNow users       

For ServiceNow users, developers, data scientists, and QA engineers

·        Configure certified environments and run day-to-day operations directly in ServiceNow

·        Transform ServiceNow’s service catalog into a robust DevOps portal:

·        Use ServiceNow Service Catalog to find a certified environment

·        Execute day-2 operations or initial provisioning