Where should update sets be moved from when updating your production instance?

[Danny Barker]

Hello,  We have been working on a complete revamp of our company production instance.  This is from a complete Service Portal makeover, new flows, fulfiller form layouts, assignment rules, UI policies, etc. 

We have been creating update sets over the last few months in our Dev environment and just recently got a Test instance to move them over to.  We are now working UAT in the Test instance and fixing items with a new update set in Dev if needed and will be moving these update sets to production very soon.   

What is the best practice approach to move update sets to Prod?  Our plan was to confirm all update sets are working in the Test instance, These update sets will all be numbered in Dev in the order they were moved to Test.  We would then clone Prod down to Test.  Lastly we would move the update sets from Dev to Prod.

If there is any reason we would need to fall back on the the Prod copy that was moved to Test, can that be done?  From what I have found is that you cannot promote an instance to Prod. Is this accurate? 

I appreciate anyone's assistance to help guide the proper path for these steps. 

[jMarshal]

It really depends on your organization's desired development approach and intent behind it.

We use our test subproduction instance for sandboxing, so we develop in dev (and/or sandbox in test), test in test and then move directly from dev to prod, when releasing to the end user. Some organizations promote up incrementally only dev > test > prod (from test to prod), which allows for a "tighter" development process, but restricts the ability to sandbox in test. There are definitely other ways to sandbox (PDI, etc)...so the need to sandbox doesn't dictate the development lifecycle/process that your organization should follow...but for us, that was key.

I like your described approach, this is very similar to the way we do it...but I would recommend cloning down AFTER release to prod. That way, the changes you make in prod are in test, for the next release cycle! 

I believe you are correct in that a sub-production instance is always a sub-production instance, but it may be possible to down-grade a production instance to sub-production...?...but what would be the use case for that...are you thinking of back-up and/or disaster recovery purposes? if so, I believe there are on-demand backups available coming in Washington...that might help mitigate that business need! https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-vancouver-df3/page/release-notes/rn-combined/washing... 

[Danny Barker]

Thank you! This makes me feel better about our current approach.  I will take a look at the link and appreciate your feedback.