XebiaLabs, ServiceNow Bring Together the Worlds of Continuous Delivery and ITSM

XebiaLabs’ latest partnership with ServiceNow has resulted in an integrated solution that aims to finally bring together the worlds of continuous delivery and ITSM.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: DevOps, ITSM, pipeline, ServiceNow, software delivery, XebiaLabs,

XebiaLabs’ latest partnership with ServiceNow has resulted in an integrated solution that aims to finally bring together the worlds of continuous delivery and ITSM. 

 

In specific, the XebiaLabs XL Release app integration, designed for enterprise customers and ServiceNow partners, creates one of the first and most comprehensive bridges between CI/CD and IT Service Management (ITSM).  XebiaLabs’ XL Release app, which integrates ServiceNow and the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform, has been certified by ServiceNow.

 

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform integration with ServiceNow was built to deliver many major benefits across the pipeline – for developers and IT Ops.  Among these benefits, XebiaLabs and ServiceNow working together can help users more easily and efficiently:

  • Manage the end-to-end DevOps toolchain
  • Stay on top of the real-time status of the work being done by different teams
  • Always know which features from the backlog actually made it into production
  • Orchestrate and automates all release activities
  • Make sure tickets are closed when the work is complete
  • Provide full visibility into the entire software delivery process for all stakeholders in the pipeline
  • Connect issue tracking and change requests to ensure user stories and change tickets are always up to date
  • Include automated and/or manual security checks into the pipeline -- including end-to-end audit tracking and robust compliance and audit reports

“DevOps adoption has accelerated at a record pace, but for the most part, ITSM processes have been left out of the change. . . . This disconnect between developers’ CI/CD pipelines and ITSM puts compliance and security at risk as developers focus on delivering features faster, but security and compliance teams are left out of the delivery process,” XebiaLabs CEO Derek Langone said in a statement. 

 

Without a reciprocal connection between development and IT operations, developers, operations staff, product owners, and others involved in software delivery have a hard time tracking and managing the mix of features, user stories, and ServiceNow IT service requests, he noted.

 

“We’re thrilled that our new certified app for connecting CI/CD to ServiceNow is available through the extensive ServiceNow ecosystem. Realizing the full promise of DevOps requires all pipelines within the delivery process to be seamlessly connected. Having our app available in the ServiceNow Store is great opportunity to bring the leading platform for enterprise DevOps to an even wider group of organizations who must ensure that their CI/CD and ITSM pipelines are fully integrated, compliant, and secure,” Langone added.

 

XebiaLabs Approach To DevOps Intelligence, Automation Enriches ITSM

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform provides the intelligence, automation, and control that technical and business teams need for Continuous Delivery at enterprise scale.

 

XebiaLabs’  ability to provide “goal-based DevOps Intelligence” delivers integrated KPIs that reveal the health of a Continuous Delivery pipeline. It combines DevOps best practices with historical analysis, machine learning, and data from across a toolchain. This shows trends, predict outcomes and recommend actions.

 

In specific, XebiaLabs DevOps Platform offers the following:

  • A Comprehensive ARO solution, including automated application deployment, advanced release orchestration, and DevOps Intelligence
  • Helps teams do DevOps on any architecture, from mainframe to hybrid clouds, to containers, to a mixture of them all
  • Orchestrates and optimizes release flow for all of the tools in your software delivery pipeline, like Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Docker, Jira and hundreds of others
  • Top-ranked DevOps technology, designed for enterprises who need to deliver software quickly, with high quality and full compliance: model-based, agentless, and easy to use—whether you prefer GUI or “as-code” interactions

Even as CI/CD gains popularity, many organizations still put their pipelines on a track separate from the other processes – including ITSM, wrote in a blog post from the XebiaLabs team earlier this month.

[T]his disconnect makes it difficult to effectively track features, user stories, and IT service requests. Enterprises often struggle to connect the feature and user stories that the development team manages in a backlog management tool like Jira to the change tickets that come in via an ITSM system like ServiceNow.

If organizations are truly aiming to eliminate waste and reduce bottlenecks in software delivery—while maintaining security and compliance—then shouldn’t they be able to see quickly which features from the backlog actually made it to production, easily track the status of change tickets, and automate and track compliance and security checks across their entire delivery process?

By connecting ITSM with CI/CD pipelines, the real-time status of features, issues, and service requests across all teams and tools in the ecosystem can be automatically tracked and visible to all, enabling software delivery to happen at top speed, while ensuring audit requirements are met, and robust compliance reports are generated.

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform provides visibility and synchronizes data across the entire pipeline by connecting issue tracking and ITSM ticketing tools so that user stories and change tickets are always up to date. 

 

Of particular interest to users who need to switch between multiple tools and environments, the just-released XebiaLabs/ServiceNow integration aims to make life easier.  In specific,  users won’t need to log in separately to every tool in their change management toolchain to manually track changes and update status information.  Rather, users can now access such information without ever leaving their favorite tool, the companies noted.

 

The XebiaLabs XL Release is available from the ServiceNow Store and can be downloaded for free.

 

XebiaLabs’ Casts Spotlight on Security and Compliance Risks

The XebiaLabs/ServiceNow integration follows XebiaLabs’ move in January to add risk assessment, security testing, and compliance checks into its platform. The update focuses on providing teams better visibility into issues such as chain of custody, security and compliance risk assessment tracking for software releases.

 

“With instant visibility into security and compliance issues, teams can take action to ensure that release failure risks, security vulnerabilities, and IT governance violations are resolved early in the software delivery cycle,” Langone said.

 

Among XebiaLabs’ notable security/compliance features are:

 

Enhanced chain of custody reporting – A new all-in-one deployment dashboard to provide a detailed view into what is being deployed, who is deploying it, and what the deployment status is -- no matter the deployment tools or the environment.

 

Security risk dashboard for software releases – This provides new visualizations that combine automated risk assessment for software delivery pipelines with detailed security and compliance information from popular tools (e.g., Black Duck, Fortify, SonarQube, and Checkmarx).

 

At-a-glance compliance overviews – A method to summarize IT governance violations for common standards such as OWASP, PCI 3.2, and CWE/SANS. The present compliance scanning activity and rule violations in an easy-to-digest format for technical, business, and compliance teams.

 

These XebiaLabs dashboards for deployment, security, and compliance are available now.

 

XebiaLabs XL JetPack Speeds App Deployments to AWS, Azure, Google Clouds

Just this week, XebiaLabs rolled out its XL JetPack DevOps technology, with the aim to deploy to popular clouds in as little as 15 minutes. XL JetPack includes all the critical components necessary for fast, error-free cloud migrations, including advanced release orchestration, deployment automation, as well as best practice blueprints for CD pipelines.

 

XL JetPack also comes with integrations to popular development tools such as Jenkins, Ansible, and CloudFormation, and built-in compliance and security functions.

 

The idea behind XebiaLabs’ XL JetPack is to automate pipelines and deployments through easy-to-use declarative DSL (domain specific language). This means no need to use low-level scripting, simple YAML.

 

[YAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files but is also used in many applications where data is being stored (e.g. debugging output) or transmitted (e.g. document headers).

 

XL JetPack attacks head-on many of the issues associated with hands-on tasks of migrating apps to the cloud, including writing scripts, configuration, ensuring apps meet security and compliance requirements and even and a lack of cloud expertise.

 

XL JetPack also offers comprehensive release orchestration and deployment automation, as well as delivers support to push apps to the cloud with all the correct settings, codified best-practices, and built-in governance.

 

XL JetPack also sports other benefits to let users:

 

  • Unify mission control with release orchestration. This ensures that every step of a release happens in the right order, with the right information propagated to the right places.
  • Establish an easily repeatable process for multi-cloud deployment automation. It let users follow a tested, repeatable process to deploy apps from dev to test to UAT to production environments on any platform, on any cloud, whether Amazon, Google, or Azure.
  • Accelerate with best-practice blueprints offer secure and immediately-usable release templates and deployment plans for leveraging cloud-based resources (Amazon ECS, EKS, etc.) This approach also lets users easily version and share apps and reuse delivery pipelines.
  • Control the launch from the command line, and manage releases in a few keystrokes: invoke blueprints, start releases and deployments, and import and export configurations, release templates, and deployment information. Taken together, this makes it easy to quickly spin-up complete release pipelines and cloud deployments.
  • Collaborate with pipeline views and give visibility to all team members. It includes automatic risk scoring, built-in alerts, and built-in approvals.
  • Monitor launches via purpose-built and customizable dashboards based on real data highlight performance, deployment activity, environment status, and security and test coverage, so teams can launch safely, monitor trends, and continuously improve.
  • Easily tap into built-in compliance, security, and, audit tracking, including full chain-of-custody reporting -- without extra coding or meetings. Plus, everything is logged in a form that’s easy for audit and compliance teams to use directly.

 

A free trial of XL JetPack is available.  




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