ServiceNow via Cloudify: Automation Challenges Solved

There’s no longer any doubt: DevOps is the way of the future. No one can deny the benefits of automation to organizations of every size and type. But when it comes time to reap those benefits, actually implementing automation can be a costly nightmare. This is especially true in companies with established development and operations teams, who are currently working to manage their workloads with traditional, manual processes.

Deploying and operating software at scale is a complex process. The more complex the process, the more time and money are required to get things done. And it’s not just about software: systems like networking and storage also need to be deployed and maintained. So, it’s no wonder that software companies have all kinds of issues when it comes to deploying and maintaining their products.

Integration Tools

Integration of tools and systems is a major challenge for DevOps. In fact, it’s a huge problem for many organizations. The reasons are endless, but the biggest is that most IT shops have to use so many disparate tools to support their DevOps initiatives.

ServiceNow and Cloudify make it easy for developers to build multi-tier distributed applications using application programming interfaces (APIs) familiar to Java, PHP, and Ruby on Rails developers. Developers can use Cloudify APIs to define application topologies, automate their deployment and manage them once they get deployed. This enables them to write more reusable code independent of individual infrastructure components, scalable and secure.

Change Management

Changes are continuously flowing in a distributed environment setting, and they need to be managed accordingly. If software change is not managed properly, it can impact the entire system’s performance.

Managing change in a traditional software development process makes change management even more challenging. For instance, it’s common for development teams to make frequent changes to the codebase to add new features or fix bugs. These changes must be integrated with the existing codebase and deployed into production individually. This can create a lot of work for the operations team, especially when manual deployment.

ServiceNow via Cloudify aims to reduce this friction by enabling continuous delivery throughout all layers of an organization’s technology stack. Automating testing, deployments, and other processes, this integration makes application updates easier and faster than ever before. The integration further improves communication between teams — development, operations, and QA — and communication with the business units that own the apps under development.

Team Planning

DevOps is all about rapid application delivery, continuous integration and deployment, automation, and optimization of the testing environment, the use of agile methodologies, etc.

But a significant part of this problem is that we are still largely working in silos in most businesses. We don’t share plans for releases with operations, nor do we share deployment plans with development. And even when we do, our organizations tend to be so large that it’s hard to hold individual engineers accountable for what they’ve committed to do.

ServiceNow via Cloudify environment as a service is a unique DevOps tool that solves this problem by providing an application platform that enables the coordination of developers and operations teams through automation of deployment and configuration tasks.

The IT service management ITSM solutions can help DevOps teams to get rid of silos and barriers standing in the way of smooth internal communications and collaboration. The tools provide visibility into the overall state of IT services, which leads to better communication among the teams working on different projects.

Pipeline Visualization

Till now, this issue was tackled by creating a static set of dashboards for monitoring or by using multiple dashboards with different levels of granularity and filters. But this approach did not work well as it was not scalable, and it wasn’t easy to manage through configuration management.

In the continuous delivery and deployment world, we need more flexibility to keep our DevOps dashboards up to date. We need something which can be easily configured and extended by adding more data points. That is why we need something that is dynamic in nature so that it is changeable at any time without impacting production systems.

With ServiceNow via Cloudify, you can continually monitor the progress of your project to completion with the flexibility and ease needed by large enterprises. Now teams will be able to get more visibility into the status of their pipeline activities in real-time because of this integration. Plus, if you want to be even more organized in your development process, this solution will ensure that there is ultimate clarity about who is responsible for specific tasks throughout each phase of your project.

Governance and Risk Management

It’s not surprising that IT organizations are struggling to address governance and risk management challenges in DevOps. After all, DevOps itself is all about speed, agility, and innovation. But there’s a reason why governance and risk are often referred to as “traditional” challenges — they’re the oldest challenges in the new world of IT.

ServiceNow Cloudify integration enables efficient governance of the enterprise application building process.

Developers can build an application on every commit. Cloudify automates tools and services to perform static code analysis. It automatically scans for open-source vulnerabilities and speeds up automated tests.

Outdated Systems DevOps and IT

As older businesses struggle to keep up in today’s technology-driven economy, legacy apps that have been with the company for decades are increasingly vulnerable to disruption.

The structure and architecture of legacy systems make it difficult to integrate them with DevOps. Unlike modern applications designed to be modular and flexible, legacy systems were built in a time when the idea of frequent deployments was unheard of.

Cloudify enables enterprises to unify their on-premises IT infrastructure with public clouds like AWS, GCP, Azure, and Azure Stack to manage them as one environment. Cloudify supports a wide range of deployment options, including on-premise servers, virtual machines, containers (Docker), and PaaS (OpenShift). Enterprises benefit from easy application migration between platforms with no downtime or impact to end-users.

Limited Expertise, High Costs for Hiring

Developers have an ever-increasing appetite for more sophisticated tools, more automation, and simpler ways to do their jobs. It’s no surprise that organizations looking to implement DevOps are often stymied by the lack of internal DevOps expertise.

A recent survey by RightScale found that 35 % of respondents said they had limited internal DevOps expertise within their organization. Another 14 % reported not having the budget to support employee training or pay contractors. That’s a tough spot to be in if you’re trying to foster a culture of continuous process improvement and innovation among your software development teams.

ServiceNow automates all provisioning requests, allowing your DevOps team to scale without the need for adding consultants. Your environments will be more agile and flexible.

With ServiceNow automating all provisioning requests, DevOps teams can develop and deploy applications rather than provisioning and maintaining the environment.

Agility in DevOps and IT Service Management

Building and deploying applications faster than your competitors can be very challenging when your organization isn’t “agile” enough to keep up. To do so, you will need to overcome several obstacles, including the time it takes for IT operations teams to deploy software.

Through the integration of ServiceNow and Cloudify, you get an environment-as-a-service (EaaS) solution that speeds up automation of workflows from development through testing all the way to production. EaaS enables DevOps teams to securely implement requests for the software and infrastructure teams need for speed and results. By eliminating manual errors and saving money, the integration handles approvals for common changes and standard configurations.

In a Nutshell

Cloudify and ServiceNow integration enables fast and cost-effective development of multi-cloud applications by optimizing automation. You get to reduce the time and effort required to manage infrastructure by up to 95 % and focus on their business while increasing agility, reducing costs, and ensuring compliance with security policies. Learn more about Cloudify and ServiceNow capabilities with our:

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