DevOps, Agile and Continuous Delivery: Creating a repeatable and reliable delivery process with ServiceNow

DevOps, Agile and Continuous Delivery: Creating a repeatable and reliable delivery process with ServiceNow

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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 1 DevOps, Agile and Continuous Delivery: Creating a repeatable and reliable delivery process with ServiceNow Hugo Raposo Advisor,SolutionConsulting ServiceNow
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 2 Table of Contents Executive Summary.......................................................................................................................................................................3 What is DevOps? ...........................................................................................................................................................................3 Automate Everything ...................................................................................................................................................................5 Creating a repeatable and reliable delivery process..........................................................................................................5 Personalized Metrics, Reports and Dashboards..................................................................................................................8 Conclusions .....................................................................................................................................................................................8 Next Steps........................................................................................................................................................................................9 Questions? .......................................................................................................................................................................................9 About the Author ..........................................................................................................................................................................9
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 3 Executive Summary The influence of cloud computing, blockchain, virtualization and artificial intelligence has become a major focus area for all sizes of organizations globally. From small businesses to multinational companies and government agencies, businesses in general are looking at the success of Google and Amazon for ideas on how to improve speed of delivery in IT, how to innovate faster, how to reduce operations costs, and how to solve online scaling problems. Financial services, global retailers and hi-tech companies share the same technology and business challenges. They all need to create a clever go-to-market strategy that allows them to grow and scale their business with a measurable, trackable, and repeatable process. Many organizations have succeeded in implementing agile methodologies, which has proven an essential component of their digital transformation and business performance. Building on that success, DevOps has recently emerged as an important enterprise-wide, value-added approach to better connect ‘development’ with ‘IT operations’. When executed well, DevOps can amplify agility and responsiveness, and help achieve faster time to market. What is DevOps? DevOps is a journey towards a new way of developing and managing the lifecycle of software applications. It first requires a mindset shift, followed by technology and process shifts. In other words, the only absolute truth is that you can’t overhaul your platforms and solutions without changing your culture and thinking. Traditional organizations will need to transform their culture and the way they work if they want to succeed in the DevOps journey. Organizations must recognize that this transformation is not a one-time project. They need to be comfortable with a constant state of change. Simplistically, DevOps consists of a set of tools and best practices created with the goal of making development and operation engineers work collaboratively during the entire software lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support. Over the last decade, analysis of software and IT practices have taught us that longer release cycles (“waterfall projects”) have dramatically higher overhead than more frequently released (“iterative” or “agile”) shorter cycles. The most obvious outcome of successful DevOps implementations is the reduction in the time it takes for software changes to transition from an idea to production operation. When a developer says a software change is “done,” the transition to production usage is performed with the aid of pervasive automation. Automated tools and processes are used in system configuration, the build process, testing, the deployment to test, staging and production environments, post-deployment monitoring, evaluation and operation. At one level, the goal of DevOps is to eliminate bottlenecks in the delivery pipeline through automation. But automation of staged processes still require governance. Most automated processes are not really autonomous—they cannot complete their tasks without human intervention in maintenance or in handling exceptions. A fully automated DevOps process is meaningless without consideration of the human factor. Although tools do a lot of heavy-lifting, it is the people running the process that make it work—or fail. In doing so, DevOps:
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 4  Increases the frequency and quality of deployments;  Improves innovation and risk-taking by making it safer to experiment;  Realizes faster time to market;  Improves solution quality and shortens the lead time for fixes;  Reduces the severity and frequency of release failures and;  Improves the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). So then, Is DevOps just Dev and Ops people working more closely with the aid of tools then? The answer is “No”. The handoffs between automated processes often involve other processes—usually testing of one kind or another. Automated tests need to be created by developers and testers. The output of these tests is focused on providing sufficient information for other processes, or just as often people, to transition between stages in the pipeline. Testers and developers who test provide the assurance that the DevOps process delivers successfully and reliably. Without a DevOps approach, there’s often significant tension between those who create new features and those who maintain the stability of the production environment. The development team is measured on the business value they deliver to end users, while IT service management is measured on the health and stability of the production environment. When each group has seemingly opposing business objectives, delivery inefficiency and organizational friction may rule the day. But DevOps ends the silo approach, providing an enterprise with the ability to develop, deploy, and release small batches of functionality to the business or customer in a flow process called the continuous delivery pipeline. At a higher level, DevOps signifies a new yin-yang of tactical and strategic balance where both departments work in unison to produce continuous software for the always-on world of cloud. This mechanism seamlessly defines, implements, and delivers solution elements to the end user, without handoffs or excessive external production or operations support. The goal is simple: deliver value whenever there is business demand. This is indeed achievable, as “high-performing IT organizations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times, 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster.”
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 5 Automate Everything Like in other Lean-Agile methodologies, DevOps simply recognizes that manual processes are the enemy of fast value delivery, safety, and high productivity. But as you may have heard, automation is not just about saving time. It also enables us to create repeatable environments and processes, which are self-documented and, therefore, easier to understand, improve, secure, and audit. The entire continuous delivery pipeline is automated with the goal of achieving a fast, Lean flow. Automation facilitates faster learning and response to market demand and customer feedback. Builds, testing, deployments, and packaging that are automated improve the reliability of processes that can be made routine. This is accomplished, in part, by building and applying an integrated and automated ‘tool chain’, as shown in Figure 2: Figure 2. ServiceNow’s DevOps Tool Chain Creating a repeatable and reliable delivery process During the Knowledge’18 Conference in Las Vegas, ServiceNow launched a new Enterprise DevOps offering as a natural extension of the existing workflow capabilities for application development. This launch is extremely timely given that 80% of companies are now expected to adopt DevOps principles within the next two years. Building on the workflow capabilities of the Now Platform, the ServiceNow Enterprise DevOps offering will debut in the first trimester of 2019 and will provide an artificial intelligence platform that enables users to
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 6 create software more easily by integrating the Now Platform with several external developer and operations toolkits. Our mission is to help customers move from previous traditional enterprise software development practices where apps are developed in one silo and then operated in another to a state-of-the-art DevOps pipeline where development and IT operations embrace agile-based methods in order to support and amplify agility, responsiveness, and faster time to market throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Our strategy is to enable ServiceNow to be the go-to workflow platform for Enterprise DevOps execution. Our workflows will help drive not only development of apps on our platform, but also the orchestration of application development of any enterprise app using ServiceNow. Figure 3. ServiceNow DevOps Architecture To help elevate the value of agile initiatives and raise the stakes for software delivery as a strategic business initiative, ServiceNow users will now be able to use ServiceNow Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) to plan the application framework and the delivery process of new capital projects, demands, enhancements, change requests and bugs, and then pass that along to the GitHub or other source-code repository. Then, users will be able to use the ServiceNow Orchestration engine along with tools like Jenkins and Hudson to implement a continuous delivery and integration strategy, automate the release pipeline, including the provisioning of new virtual environments and execute automated tests (functional, performance, security, etc.).
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 7 Figure 4. ServiceNow DevOps Process Figure 5. DevOps Application Lifecycle Management In a similar way, the ServiceNow REST APIs will allow users to easily generate incidents in their ServiceNow Incident Management environment whenever they have failures in their DevOps process due to either infrastructure automation updates failing or automated compliance check failures. This integration with ServiceNow ITSM will give DevOps customers the ability to capture all failures across their estate for resolution and tracking purposes as a way to ensure any infrastructure automation problems are resolved rapidly and compliance failures are tracked and corrected based on internal best practices. The key components of this integration include:  Incident management for infrastructure and compliance automation – This capability gives users the ability to create ServiceNow incident tickets, alert/page operations or information security,
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 8 so that automation and compliance failures are actioned as quickly as possible and in agreement with customer- or regulatory-mandated SLAs or OLAs.  Intelligent data management and event de-duplication — The integration intelligently uses ServiceNow Event Management as a central data aggregator and de-duplicates events, so that repeated failures do not open repeated incident tickets. Instead, they update relevant fields in ServiceNow, such as the time of last failure. This helps reduce overall alert noise, in contrast to non- standardized approaches that send data directly from managed nodes to ServiceNow.  Compliance-related integration opportunities with other capabilities on the ServiceNow platform — The data stream of compliance events generated by this integration can now be leveraged by other applications on the ServiceNow platform. For example, governance and risk compliance (GRC) or security/incident management (SIEM) systems that have integrations with ServiceNow can now have access to this data. For those companies who have standardized on such systems, ServiceNow GRC platform allows users to enhance their overall risk dashboard with real time, continuous compliance events that are already properly prioritized, rather than inundating these systems with meaningless, context-free data, as was the case previously. By creating a strong bridge between development and operations, ServiceNow provides users with a way to proactively identify spikes on the number of incidents and track this back to specific test suites and even specific code changes. Then, users will be able to revise the tests to reduce the number of issues making it into production and use this as an opportunity to improve the test suites for specific applications. By integrating AI algorithms into the DevOps process, DevOps teams can automate vital activities and test for potential bugs and security flaws early. This speeds up product releases and frees developers to focus on more strategic tasks. Personalized Metrics, Reports and Dashboards ServiceNow DevOps includes built-in metrics, key performance indicators (KPI), breakdowns and surveys to measure service levels and drive continual service improvement around the enterprise software delivery. Users can create additional metrics and surveys to collect more data and present results in interactive reports and dashboards and have the ability to monitor longer trends. A simple and flexible reporting engine allows users to quickly generate, customize, and save reports directly from a list of records with a simple right-click for instant analysis. Users can also personalize dashboards by simply dragging and dropping gauges and reports to highlight the most important information to them. Conclusions IT departments starting to move to virtual and cloud environments need to prepare for the day their customized, mission-critical production applications will also move to virtual and (hybrid) cloud environments, even though the cloud may be currently used only for dev-and-test. This move will put a whole new set of pressures (and measures) on application release operations to ensure that the business is getting the full benefit from its move to the cloud. As partof any cloud strategy, companies need to prepare and ensure that their application release operations are “cloud-ready”.
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  © 2018 ServiceNow,Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 9 ServiceNow DevOps can help you automate the deployment of application changes to a variety of tiers - App server, database server, web server etc., as well as across multiple servers and environments hosted in the cloud, all within a single deployment while enforcing dependencies. Next Steps Now that the framework and ideas around how to introduce ServiceNow DevOps to the enterprise have been outlined, start thinking about the next steps: • Is there an upcoming event or go-live these recommendations can be incorporated into? • Schedule a webinar. Don’t necessarily start company-wide; test it out in a controlled environment or small project. • Start up a monthly governance meeting – pull in the Executive Sponsor and service owners or kick- start the platform team. Remind everyone why the journey was started in the first place and what are the short-term and long-term goals that you're hoping to achieve with the pilot project. Questions? Reach out to your ServiceNow account team or Champion Enablement Community. Ask questions, post successes, or ask to see what others have done in a certain area. Introducing ServiceNow DevOps to the enterprise won’t happen overnight. By driving awareness, having the appropriate targets identified, and partnering with ServiceNow, transformation will begin to happen! About the Author Hugo Raposo is an experienced technology leader with more than 22 years of experience in Enterprise Architectures, Agile and Digital transformations initiatives, Project & Portfolio Management (PPM), SDLC, Cloud computing, DevOps/Continuous Delivery and Service-oriented Architectures (SOA). Hugo is an active contributor in the DevOps and Agile Management communities and has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of the software development lifecycle and in digital and agile transformation initiatives. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at agile and testing conferences across the USA, Canada and Brazil. Educated at the University of Campinas and Catholic University of Pernambuco in Brazil, he has a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.