Cloudify partners with ServiceNow for business cloud automation

Clouds can really help your business. If, and it’s a big if, you can get it to work for you. That’s where companies such as Cloudify, with its open source business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform, come in.  Now, to make it more powerful, you can use the Cloudify infrastructure automation platform with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM), part of the digital workflow of its Now Platform.

Cloudify enables you to trade online with your customers while fully integrating orders, pricing, product, and stock data with a range of enterprise resource planning (ERP) such as SAP, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics. It also works with warehouse and accounting back office systems. Using plugins, you can also use your existing toolchains such as Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes for even more advanced automation capabilities.

Put it all together, and you get what Cloudify calls ‘Environment As A Service’ (EaaS). Nati Shalom, Cloudify’s CTO and Founder sees EaaS as the next generation of DevOps. “It’s all about how to drive innovation and make a lot of those distributed systems as simple as the local system,” said Shalom.

Ultimately, the company claims, EaaS will let you run applications across multiple cloud or data center platforms at the click of a button for premium multicloud infrastructure orchestration and automation. 

Today, the Cloudify platform has expanded its reach again. It’s now available in the ServiceNow Store. Using Cloudify with ITOM enables you to work with your development team to automatically remediate your cloud resource configuration.

This is done by validating resources through ServiceNow Cloud Configuration Governance (CCG). From there, you trigger remediation actions. These are then automatically executed through Cloudify. Finally, they’re deployed through ServiceNow or Continous Integration/Continous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. 

The company claims, “Developers can enjoy a self-service experience needed to rapidly spin up and tear down dev/test environments with minimal effort, as well as simplifying change management of production environments.”

The pair gives you the tools you need for an Agile-first approach to creating, sharing, and managing cloud and multi-cloud work environments for your cloud developers. On a day-to-day basis, the Now Platform acts as the workflow automation engine. At the same time, Cloudify takes care of environment creation and Day 2 management.

From a broader viewpoint, with Cloudify and ITOM, companies can speed up their provisioning and management of multi-cloud infrastructure deployments with their DevOps and IT teams working together efficiently. 

Specifically, Cloudify states with the ServiceNow pairing it becomes easier to: 

• Regulate policies and automate configuration compliance and tag standardization on the multi-cloud. With ITOM Governance, IT teams can define configuration and tag policies, and identify violations. These can then be fixed by ITOM Governance and Cloudify.
• Get DevOps and IT teams on the same page. This is done by using Cloudify to maintain the deployed environment while enabling IT operators to remediate violations through ServiceNow. It all gives everyone a single pane of glass between CI/CD pipelines and ServiceNow actions.
• All this cuts down on remediation downtime.

The result? “Developers are always being asked to move faster and push new features to production quickly,” said Brian Emerson, ServiceNow’s ITOM VP and GM in a press release. And this will enable them to keep up with the demand. Ariel Dan, Cloudify’s CEO, added, “Now DevOps can manage heterogeneous cloud environments at scale while being in compliance with IT processes. Ultimately, this means “an organization can manage end-customer environments and internal Dev/QA/Production environments more efficiently.”

And, isn’t managing and getting your business cloud and its resources to work more effectively your end goal? Why, yes, yes, I think it is. 

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