Are you managing Microservices and their lifecycle in your CMDB?

[jgbeyer]

I am often asked how to manage all the microservices of a company in the best possible way. I have an answer to it, but to be honest, I am biased.

So, I would like to learn from you what are your thoughts hot to to it in the best possible way.

[David104]

Tricky question as there are a few different interpretations of what a micro-service actually is and then there is the question of "what is a Service / Business Service / Application / Technical Service etc"

This is just my opinion and I'm working from my understanding of the ServiceNow CSDM 2.0 white paper - which does not appear to mention micro-services specifically.

If you look at the definition of a Technical Service in the CSDM - a "Technical service is a service type that is published to service owners and typically underpins one or more business or application services." I would suggest that if the micro-service stack itself was an offering that could be spun up as a self-contained instance (eg. an instance for each developer), then you might make that available as a Technical Service offering.

Having said that, if the micro-service was built in a way that it was discoverable by service mapping, it might actually be discovered as an Application Service and could include CI's such as web server, database, container etc which make up the micro-service. In that case, perhaps the Micro-services would be better tracked as 'Application Service' CI's in the CMDB. If you wanted to be able to monitor the health of the micro-service and the parts that make it up, then I would suggest that an Application Service is the correct option.

So perhaps you would have an 'Application Service' CI for each instance of the micro-service (or Technical Service offering) that has been provisioned

Regards,

David

[Deanna Quigley-]

Our direction from Service Now is to use Application Services, the current plan is you can add a classification (Micro-Service) . I am looking to get validation that this is the case, as we are building the CSDM Model as shown in the 2.0 white paper

[Michael Quan]

Firstly, answer this question 'what is the business value of storing and managing the microservices in a CMDB'? Let's take an example that a retail ecom has the following microservices or services:

Customer Profile

Product Catalogue

Order

Checkout

They are not technical services such as Infrastructure Platform, DevOps and Testing / QA. Microservices are deployed on the container platform, orchestrated by Kubernetes and running on containers so how can we manage the lifecycle of orchestrated containers? We can define these services in a CMDB or ITSM but do we care if a new container get spun up? There are tools that can discover containers these days but there is limited value.