Accelerate your deployments using the ServiceNow HashiCorp Terraform Connector

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It is quite challenging to define an overloaded term, as the implication and usage of such words have varying meanings. The same applies to ‘Automation’. This is usually perceived as a mechanism to kick off repetitive and mundane tasks with varying inputs, so that the outputs can provide enough insight to assure quality or maintain a process. Another perception might lead one to think examples of automating financial elements of life, such as direct depositing checks, deducting 401(k) contributions, and charging and paying off credit card bills.

So how is it that automation can be extended to speed up the creation of building blocks for software applications used globally by an enterprise?

Try your script at it.

Granted the concept of automation is limitless, the art of possibility has paved its way to realms of software infrastructure that were inconceivable in the not so distant past. Full-fledged software infrastructures are provisioned using scripts that automate the creation of infrastructure in totality. This allows automated processes to spin up machines with not only specified compute, storage and networking bandwidths, but also the geographic locale, security groups, and custom settings. Augmenting the automation to the point of being agnostic to cloud providers allows the same set of automated scripts to be reusable for ease of use, and also to foster the swift infrastructure building of solutions that reside on hybrid clouds. This allows architects to utilize ready-made or custom blueprints from cloud providers in terms of functionality, specification, or cost, and deploy applications on a complex infrastructure that is spun up in minutes, something that is unattainable manually, or even when using cloud-centric scripts.

These practices are making their way to becoming de facto standards to produce abundant throughput for customers to consume in this time of digital transformation.

Another after-effect of using automated infrastructure-as-code allows the standardization of processes for organizations to implement globally. Departments like HR, Facilities, Finance and Operations can reuse infrastructure scripts to be deployed globally, and never encounter procedural blockers that usually are the result of human error or misunderstanding. Adopting a seamless ecosystem, adhering to best practices, saving time, money and resources will increase business ROI and improve experiences for operators, admins, developers, and of course, the customer.

The need for speed.

HashiCorp has developed an integration between Terraform and ServiceNow for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently, as well as giving end users a seamless experience to request infrastructure from the ServiceNow Service Catalog.

It is commonly known that people ranging from newly hired individuals to long time professionals encounter blockers in their ability to do their daily tasks due to poorly designed and executed processes that are usually the result of avoidable errors. Removing the human element from such practices results in productivity. Imagine Henry Ford’s assembly line that optimized the production of cars. Prior to Ford’s assembly line, cars were still being produced, but at a rate of less than 20%. Now visualize the same assembly line crunching out cars of all Makes and Models at a much faster speed. That is what automating infrastructure-as-code is doing, only that it crunches out entire software machine setups catering to all cloud providers for highly scalable applications.

This functionality in conjunction with a simple point and click interface makes the execution process easier for users from all backgrounds and all industries. This effectively allows people to kick off automation from their phones using federated platforms with complete audit trails and cost control guardrails in place. Factoring in any changes to the infrastructure, and having versions associated to the deployment is now a part of the process. It is no less than a wonder that this level of automation facilitates the creation of new innovative products, morphs best practices based on efficient operations, and results in happier customers. The range of applications resulting from such config files are from running a single, low complexity, static web site to a full-fledged datacenter, with Load Balancers in place, and that are catering to numerous global and scalable web applications. The entire experience enables version control and automation, reducing human error and increasing productivity.

We’ll leave it to time, for this overloaded term, automation, to define its new meaning in the world of digital transformation.

For more information about the HashiCorp integration with ServiceNow, please read the announcement here!