As the market shifts to a cloud first strategy for both development and IT operations, ServiceNow is right there beside you with new technologies to support your journey. At Knowledge17 we announced an improved version of our Cloud Management application giving employees the freedom to access cloud resources and IT the power to stay in control.
With ServiceNow Cloud Management you'll be able to deliver a consumer-like self service experience for users while enforcing good governance to reduce risks, and manage costs. Let's take a quick tour of the improved solution.
Cloud User Portal
We've started with a beautiful consumer-like experience where users have visibility into their cloud resources including spending, performance against quotas and operational details such as status and health information.
Image 1: Cloud User Portal
Cloud Service Catalog
From the dashboard, users access a personalized service catalog showing their authorized cloud resources. These offerings can be abstracted from the underlying cloud provider as cloud portable workloads. Upon ordering, user quotas are validated, and if required approval workflows are triggered in The Now Platform. When approvals are completed (or not required), the deployment is executed in real-time using the latest design information (see blueprints later in this article) and most up-to-date IT policies. Once deployed, tags are automatically applied and all of the relevant information for the cloud resources is stored in the centralized data store, also known as the ServiceNow CMDB.
Image 2: Cloud Service Catalog
Management and Operations
The improved Cloud Management application enables the user to be self-sufficient with lifecycle operations. This gives the user more control and responsibility to efficiently manage their allocations. Drilling into the details of a stack of cloud resources, and looking into the Activities panel below, you'll see the user also has access to Change Requests, Incidents and Cloud Events affecting this resource.
Image 3: Cloud Stack Details
If the user needs additional assistance, they can simply create a new incident in-line and automatically attribute the issue to this resource in the CMDB.
Image 4: Incident integration
Cloud Blueprint Designer
In the improved Cloud Management application, we've taken a fresh, new approach to enabling your multi-cloud strategy. Cloud architects can design catalog items by assembling blueprints of re-usable objects, simplifying and speeding the delivery of offerings into the service catalog. This unique approach enables cloud resources to be designed without the need to know the underlying cloud service provider.
Image 5: Blueprint Designer
Good Governance Through Separation of Policies
While the blueprints enable you to create cloud agnostic workloads, there is another yet equally important abstraction we have made in Cloud Management. We have separated out the policies from the technical definition (blueprint). This allows you to apply different policies such as naming policy, security policy, etc. as needed during different times of the execution stage. By abstracting the policies, you get tremendous flexibility in managing those policies. You don't have to worry about re-writing all of your service offerings every time there is a change.
Cloud Billing Visibility
The Cloud Management application enables IT to consolidate billing information from multiple-clouds, and multiple accounts into a single view. This gives IT complete visibility into the costs of cloud resources and enables the analysis of those costs for showback/chargeback at a granular level.
Image 6: Cloud Cost Management
Summary
Cloud Management is an integral part of ServiceNow IT Operations Management and works seamlessly with other ServiceNow offerings such as IT Service Management and The NOW Platform. By providing users with a consumer-like self service experience, enforcing good governance to reduce risk, and by managing cloud cost, Cloud Management helps you give employees the freedom to access cloud resources while IT gets the power to stay in control.
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