Recomendation / Best Practice for Cloning

[Daniel Draes]

Hi all,

do we have some recommendation or best practice around cloning?

We do recommend to our customers to clone the ServiceNow instances on a regular basis. How about keys and proxies?

In order to be able to read encrypted data after a clone we will probably just need to use the same keystore on all environments, right?

How about the mysql DB for tokens? I guess we would recommend to use separate databases for the different environments, would we recommend to clone the database as well? Would we have some guides for the customers on how (e.g. mysql_dump,...) ?

Thanks,

Daniel

[russell_gabriel]

Daniel,

This is a great question.   In order to support instance closing from Prod over sub-prod, the sub-prod instances must have the same encryption and signature keys.   The encryption keys are used to decrypt the encrypted values while the signature keys are used to sign the rules and configurations.   If your sub-prod environments are missing the same keys that were used in prod, you'll not be able to bring your proxy online after you clone.  

As for the database, you'll want to use caution here.   You may wish to support reading the prod database from subprod, but you don't want to write to the prod database from subprod...as the records entered or modified in subprod will not be available in prod.   The best case would be to replicate your prod mysql database to your subprod mysql database at the same time you clone your instance.

[Daniel Draes]

Thanks Rusty.

Would be great if we can document this somewhere on the docs page for customers to refer to.