Why MID server installation is mandatory for Cloud Management

[vishal72]

I have doubt on Cloud Management. I was configuring cloud services between ServiceNow and AWS/Azure. I have successfully configured Service Account and was trying to make data-center discovery. The process failed with error "Could not locate an active mid server - No valid MID Server is available to select from." I have checked on community and was able to understand that for Jakarta release installation of MID server is mandatory for cloud management.

I want to understand that, In a client environment where Active directory is Integrated with ServiceNow, why do we need to configure MID server for cloud management between ServiceNow to any of Cloud services like (AWS,Azure etc). Is it for Authentication or for Connectivity to Client Environment resources?

Would like to understand from the architecture point of view.

[preddy]

Hi Vishal,

A MID Server is required to bridge the connection between your instance and the cloud resources.

[vishal72]

Hi Pavan,

But it's not needed for AWS/Azure - the platform integrates directly using web calls, rather than instructing the MID to do the same.

This is a strange requirement; I thought the point of Cloud Management was to negate using local (on-premise) kit, and thus the MID became unnecessary.

I do not understand why do we need MID server for communication between 2 cloud application. I would like someone to clear this from architecture level. I believe there would some logical answer behind it but i am unable to think of it as of now.

[Thilo Grobe · Accepted solution]

Amongst other things in CM the MID Server is used for processing the billing data from the public cloud providers. This is a very demanding task - offloading it primarily increases instance performance. Since CM now supports many more scripting languages besides JavaScript to interact with cloud   resources, the MID Server also functions as a runtime environment for these languages. Much the same like powershell or ssh in orchestration, which cannot be executed on the instance but need a separate host with the respective capability.

hope this helps,

cheers,

Thilo

[Callan Bond]

Late reply, but for those who arrived at this post through Google or other methods, there is also a fairly good answer to this question from Zack Sargent in this thread.