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Chuck Tomasi
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Your most valued time is in creating solutions, not administrative tasks like promoting and validating changes. Since the Now Platform® is all about automation, why not automate your deployment process? Learn how you can save time, gain control, and deploy your changes into production faster.

Originally aired: June 29, 2021 8:00 AM PT

  • 00:00: Welcome and introductions
  • 03:37 Announcements
  • 05:51 Introduction to Dev Ops on ServiceNow apps
  • 14:04 Poll question 1
  • 17:12 Poll question 2
  • 20:05 Demo and Q&A
  • 37:19 Poll question 3
  • 40:00 Demo resumed
  • 40:57 Roadmap
  • 52:29 Takeaways
  • 53:11 Outro

 

Links Mentioned

 

Featured Experts

Chiarng Lin is a Principal Product Manager at ServiceNow. Developer Productivity, source control, CI/CD, the CLI, and other things to make developers more productive. Originally he had a biomedical engineering degree, but soon turned to software engineering. He started as a developer in 2010, been doing product management for the past several years, and has been with ServiceNow since early 2020.

 

 

Chuck Tomasi is a Sr. Developer Advocate for ServiceNow. He is a computer science major with over 35 years of IT experience. As a former ServiceNow customer, Chuck won the first Innovation of the Year Award at Knowledge 10. Since joining ServiceNow in 2010 as a Technical Consultant, he has done many large scale ITSM implementations and custom applications, acted as an adjunct instructor for Education Services, created and lead the Technical Best Practices program, makes appearances on Live Coding Happy Hour, created dozens of fit for purpose custom applications, and co-hosts the ServiceNow series "TechNow".

 

Kreg Steppe is a Sr Staff Enterprise-wide Apps/Sys Developer within ServiceNow Training and Certification developing and supporting cloud training infrastructure. He specializes in developing integration solutions, automating repeatable processes and Cloud Management in ITOM. Kreg's prior experience includes operating his own ISP, developing web applications in PHP, network integration, managing network support, Application Development on cloud based networks, DNS and email server maintenance. He is a Linux enthusiast and enjoys Photography.

 

Jeremy Duncan is a Platform Architect on the Workflow Design Studio team at ServiceNow. Jeremy is an Enterprise Architect with over 16 years of IT and Service Management experience. His experience and certifications span across retail and manufacturing with focuses on hardware, software, and information security specialties and is a ServiceNow Certified Master Architect. He has done many implementations in both the Enterprise Federal and Commercial spaces since 2011 and brings a breadth of platform knowledge that aids him in sound architectural decisions. He achieved his B.B.A. at MTSU and majored in Information Systems. He spends his free time fighting crime as a volunteer certified police officer in North Nashville since 2012 and enjoys family time, camping, with his wife and kids!

 


Questions and Answers

does this require more SN instances? and cost?
-- Kevin Nelson
The CI/CD functionality is in the platform. Some of the APIs to GitHub, for examples, require spokes from the store, and additional instances would incur costs at this point. We are looking at options for that in the future.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
How does change control happen within this model? Can RFC/change requests also be automated in this model?
-- Emily Scott
The CI/CD is more about optimizing the deployment (output) of the development process whereas RFC/change requests are input that still needs to be vetted, approved, etc. So, short answer, no.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
does the CI/CD also connect to the release management? or is the association of change to release needs to be done manually ?
-- Nirnay Sharma
Today you would have to do this yourself. (answered live around 35m)
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
Are you planning to add feature toggles?
-- Ken Franco
Can you elaborate in the comments below what you are interested in seeing?
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
How or where do you configure the acceptance criteria which the orchestrator must assess to determine the next trigger
-- Mark Sternberger
Acceptance criteria are for acceptance of stories/epics. So those should be tracked in stories/epics. For build pipeline conditions, that should be a definition of done such as "all tests in a particular suite passing".
-- Chiarng Lin
 
Can you please elaborate again on the relationship with Github?
-- Kevin Cioffi
Source Control can be used to link applications to GitHub repos. You can also use GitHub Actions workflows as your build pipeline, by leveraging GitHub Actions we've published onto their marketplace wrapping our CI/CD APIs.
-- Chiarng Lin
 
so if I am touching multiple applications for a feature, I will need to create multiple branches per application in an instance?
-- Johnny Li
You don't necessarily need multiple branches per application. I've seen plenty of implementations done using a single (master/main) branch.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
So this is about "outside" of SN, or this is CI/CD "inside" SN?
-- Mark Sternberger
Hybrid. He's answering tjhis live.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
Can I confirm what is just mentioned? One feature branch per application only today?
-- Johnny Li
..Per instance. That is correct
-- Kreg Steppe
 
Before you merge the code back into Master are there ways to set up Pull Requests/Code Reviews?
-- Mark Fesenmeyer
You can use marketplace build steps or extensions (or GitHub Actions in the demo case) to automate creation of pull requests and auto merge if you'd like, otherwise that should be done in the remote Git repo tool of choice.
-- Chiarng Lin
 
How do you assure "speed up" - hint the answer is not more threads, or CPU?
-- Mark Sternberger
Correct me if I'm wrong - It sounds like you are interested in measuring value of implementing Dev Ops practices and CI/CD to ensure you get a return on your investment (of the time to implement.) Some of that is going to depend on how you are doing things today. Like any proof-of-concept, measure how long it takes to do the end-to-end process today, then determine where the "non-value add" time is that can be automated by Dev Ops, then put together a POC to estimate what you can save. Our solution consultants and product managers are here to assist as needed.
--
 
what is the current version of ServiceNow? Is it Quebec?
-- Kenneth Goodrow
Yes, Quebec was released in March 2021. Our next release, Rome is scheduled to be generally available in September 2021.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
so I can do one feature branch to capture changes made across multiple application scopes, similar to the batch update set concept?
-- Johnny Li
Each app is going to have its own source control repository. Each repository can have one or more branches to control changes on that app.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
for someone coming from a 'mainstream' sw dev background - what does it mean - an instance supports only one branch...?
-- andrei shpakov
An instance is the ServiceNow server running the full suite of software (dev, test, prod, for example are three instances.) When you download the repo to the instance, it's the version that everyone on that instnace is working on.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
are there technical components that this can't handle? such as service mapping patterns? alert impact tree rules? discovery credentials?
-- Kevin Nelson
I'm not aware of records that can't be added to a global app, but I'll note that not every type of record shows up in Dev Studio left panel once added today.
-- Chiarng Lin
 
Does all the toolchain telemetry you are leveraging have to be hosted in a cloud?
-- Mark Sternberger
Toolchain telemetry? It's up to your team where and how you want to share and track build status for your merges. ServiceNow DevOps product is intended to be that product for on-platform. https://www.servicenow.com/products/devops.html
-- Chiarng Lin
 
How to resolve the commit conflict in the situation that multiple developers touch the same file, and if more complex, touch the same line of code?
-- Johnny Li
Git repo tools provide merge conflict detection for files and lines of code. Today, resolving those merge conflicts practically means rebuilding the feature onto another branch, especially if it's not a script file, because code-merging XML records is a challenge today.
-- Chiarng Lin
 
Can you have multiple developers using different git branches on the same sn instance?
-- Jack Grochowski
Not at this time. To address multiple branches would require multiple instances. It's still one app, one branch, one instance.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
again in - mainstream - git repo is an ultimate source of truth and an app is always deployable from master. here in the demo is is just an update set?
-- andrei shpakov
The source control is separate from update sets. If done right, one would use source control entirely and no update sets at all.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
We use SNow as a university. There is a central team that manages major upgrades or configuration changes. Our division has access to build request work flows. We currently do this manually in SNow. Would this SNow DevOps tool allow US to build request work flows for example as a non-global SNow admin?
-- Justin Ellison
This sounds more like a Delegated Development question. But assuming you have the right privileges granted by your admin team, there's no reason why your team couldn't be building and shipping your own workflow apps (likely scoped for this case).
-- Chiarng Lin
 
What about IAST?
-- Mark Sternberger
What aspect of security testing as you trying to do on an app built on Now Platform? You're not analyzing source code for vulnerabilities. This question doesn't makes sense.
-- Chiarng Lin
 
How are changes actually getting captured in Github?
-- Kevin Cioffi
When you commit changes from Studio's Source Control menu, it pushes the XML files associated with each affected record.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
And can you do this on-premises, or do you require that all the code be in a cloud
-- Mark Sternberger
This can be done for on-prem customers as well.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
how can we link non-custom apps to Source Control? for an example HR, CSM, Global
-- Chetan Gandhi
In Quebec we support customizations to OOB apps and store apps to work with Studio, source control, and the app repo.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
Will this integrate with existing servicenow processes like change management and can we automate the change management process for those changes that deploy using CICD
-- Kenneth Goodrow
Short answer - yes. He answered this live around 23m. in
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
Is there a DevOps, Roadmap / Lifecycle flow that ultimately outlines how it would work?
-- Steve Koziel
Our outbound product team is working on docs for set up and best practices. We also try to provide templates to get you up and running quickly.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
Can this be interactive dialog / questions. Or do we have to wait until the end. I'm already lost
-- Mark Sternberger
We'll try to answer your questions in near-real-time. If he's in the middle of something, we may have to wait.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
What does SN prefer to use for the overarching Continuous Deployment Pipeline orchestration platform?
-- Mark Sternberger
We don't force you to use anything. You could use Git, you could use Jenkins (if you already have that set up) or you could do this within our platform. Totally your choice.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
do you have a working example of creating the change going into prod
-- Kenneth Goodrow
I believe he demonstrated that with the change he made to the script include. Let me know if I didn't understand the question.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
How is the transition done (in practice) to CI/CD from Update Sets? Beta teams first. Rolled out to individual teams as "ready". Or other ways?
-- Mike Cook
I recommend avoiding the mix of update sets or source control. Choose one and stick with it.
-- Chuck Tomasi
 
where would the change be created as part of the deploy
-- Kenneth Goodrow
This really depends on your org's processes. But if you want to automate change management requests, you can use the ServiceNow DevOps BU product. https://www.servicenow.com/products/devops.html
-- Chiarng Lin