How to manage/maintain Cloud Foundry (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) in CMDB

[Mahesh120]

Hi Experts,

We are planning to use ServiceNow CMDB to maintain CIs related to Cloud Foundry which is kind of cloud computing platform services. At present, there is no specific CI class is available to store such data. And build relationship with the Applications.

Would like to know, if anyone has done something similar and what would be best approach to start with?

Regards,

Mahesh.

[svrc]

Hi Mahesh,

I've put together an example comprehensive set of CI classes for Cloud Foundry for a customer - this isn't implemented yet but was to illustrate how deep they could go if they wanted to track all of the elements of CF inside SNOW.  

https://s3.amazonaws.com/svrc/Cloud+Foundry+CMDB+Model.pdf

Most of these CIs could be auto-populated out of BOSH and the CF API via a regular polling job that grabs the latest events from CF and synchronizes them with the SNOW CMDB API.

In short, we re-used the cluster CI classes to represent BOSH-related CIs, the Environment class to represent a CF space, and an Application class for a particular application.  

I added an example change management mapping of CF activities to change request risk levels, and a color-coded example to show how a CF upgrade would look from a CI-impact perspective.   For example, via a BOSH deployment would dispose of old VMs (and their CIs), but retain the BOSH job CIs as continuity, and depending on your specific setup of CF, such as single BOSH job instances for particular components like the NFS blobstore, or MySQL /PostreSQL database(s),   may lead to some downtime on the CF API & Apps Manager (Red), but would retain zero downtime for the apps themselves (green).  

All of the above may be overkill for many organizations, as it really depends how rich your CMDB is and what specific use cases you're looking Service Now to handle (risk assessments, incident dependency maps, CI maps associated with RFCs, etc.)

HTH

Stu

[Mahesh120]

Hi Stu,

Thanks   for sharing the details and it is very extensive. I will go through them in detail.

My immediate need is to create a CF class and associate them with Applications. As per the details, it shows CF class extends Cluster. Since CF deployed on cloud computing platform (PaaS), is there a need to create a new class for Paas.

Regards,

Mahesh.

[svrc]

So CF is a PaaS , the question is, what processes do you need the CF CI for?  

If you just want to show where the app is hosted, an instance of a cluster class or maybe even another application instance   called "cloud foundry" might be sufficient to relate to.  

Main issue is if your config managers want virtual machine CIs directly related to applications, that is very hard with a PaaS where you can't predict which host has which application, and why a cluster instance can be helpful.

[Mahesh120]

Hi Stuart,

I have put up a simple data model with required components. Please take a look at it and advise. Many thanks in advance.

Also, want to build in such a way there is no much re-design in future if want to extend the functionality to other PaaS platforms.

Regards,

Mahesh.