Introducing ServiceNow Integration

ServiceNow has many use cases — including implementing IT service management (ITSM) processes, automating workflows, integrating with existing tools, and providing analytics and reporting  — making its Service Catalog a logical choice for ServiceNow customers extending self-service to developers.

It enables platform teams to build a catalog of products and services employees can easily request to enable self-service. It standardizes processes and improves overall operational efficiency.

When organizations want to orchestrate their infrastructure pipelines for Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Terragrunt, Ansible, and Kubernetes, they turn to Spacelift. Our unified orchestration workflow makes us a one-stop shop for provisioning, configuring, and governing your infrastructure, offering:

• Policy as code via Open Policy Agent – Platform teams can restrict certain resources/resource parameters; require multiple approvals for run, control where to send notifications; and control what happens when a PR is opened or merged.
• Workflow dependencies – Teams can create dependencies between their configurations and get the ability to share outputs.
• Drift detection and remediation – Infrastructure drift can be detected and remediated automatically. 
• Dynamic credentials for major cloud providers – You can integrate easily with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for short-lived credentials
• Many other features

Spacelift Blueprints are YAML templates that configure all aspects related to your stacks: repository, tool, policies, cloud integrations, contexts, schedules, etc. With Blueprints, you can also define input variables, and the result of a Blueprint will be a form that your engineers can complete. You can create a stack by filling in a Blueprint form, and this process can be repeated by anyone in your team, as often as you want, based on their access level.

The image above shows an example of a Blueprint form. Its structured nature makes it a natural fit for the Service Catalog.

For a developer, this integration will simplify the process of requesting infrastructure, as they will log in to ServiceNow as normal, find the Service Catalog item that maps to the Blueprint, fill that in, and order it. The stack will then be created in Spacelift. Based on the Blueprint capability, developers will be able to provision or configure infrastructure, orchestrate containers, or perform all these activities, depending on how the Blueprint was developed by the platform team.

Integrating Spacelift with ServiceNow greatly expands self-service capabilities and meets engineers where they are, so they can use familiar tools to do their jobs. This reduces frustration for developers and platform teams and improves overall time to market.

Check out this article to learn more about how Spacelift can improve your infrastructure orchestration capabilities.

It’s pretty simple to configure the integration between Spacelift and ServiceNow. Here are the steps at a high level:

• Define a dedicated user in ServiceNow that lets Spacelift create resources.
• In Spacelift, configure the ServiceNow integration using that user.
• Create a Spacelift Blueprint, publish it, and then share it with ServiceNow.
• Order this Blueprint using the Service Catalog from ServiceNow. This will create the Spacelift stack.

Let’s see it in action:

In your ServiceNow account, create a dedicated user that lets Spacelift create resources in ServiceNow as documented here.

In your Spacelift account, you will see a new option called ServiceNow:

After you click on it, in the top right corner, you will have an option to create the integration.  Choose that option and fill in the form with the correct details from ServiceNow:

Next, click on Create to get the integration up and running. 

Now you can create integrations from your Spacelift Blueprints to Service Catalog Items. Let’s take a look:

In your Spacelift account, navigate to Blueprints and select one of them. For this example, I chose a Blueprint that lets you create a different number of EC2 instances in your AWS account based on your input. You can also select the operating system and instance types for the instances.

To publish this Blueprint as a service catalog item, select the Integrations tab, and then choose the previously created ServiceNow integration in the Attach integration drawer:

After you click on Attach, your Blueprint Integration tab will appear like this:

Now, go to your ServiceNow account and find the item created by the Blueprint in your Service Catalog. Next, populate it with the necessary information.

For this example, I’ve decided to create 4 amazon-linux ec2 instances with a t2.micro type, and I’ve named the stack ec2ServiceNow. 

Because I’ve selected “trigger a run upon stack creation”, as soon as I click on the “Order Now” button, you will see the stack created in my Spacelift account, and a run will also be triggered.

This is what you will see in ServiceNow after clicking on “Order now”:

In your Spacelift account, you can easily observe the stack being created and see that the run is in progress:

If we check the plan, we will see that we will create four EC2 instances as specified in the ServiceNow order:

This is just a simple example, and because Spacelift has its own Terraform provider, you could easily create a Blueprint that would generate a full infrastructure workflow, combining Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes, taking advantage of shareable outputs, leveraging policy as code, and more.

As you’ve seen above, a Blueprint like that could be easily shared with Service Now – right now, only through the process described above – giving you the ability to create powerful self-service infrastructure from the Service Catalog you know and use.

To learn more about Blueprints, check out our documentation.

As part of our goal to always ensure we are building something worthwhile, we’re seeking feedback on our ServiceNow integration. We want to expand in ways that excite you, so we’ll be actively gathering your observations. Let us know what you want to see out of a ServiceNow integration with Spacelift. Tell us your dream flow/pipeline/setup, and we may end up building it! 

Giving developers access to a self-service catalog is key to increasing velocity, but you still need to automate the provisioning and configuration work that the platform team needs to do for those requests. By integrating the powerful infrastructure orchestration features of Spacelift with the centralization and simplicity of ServiceNow’s Service Catalog, organizations get a supercharged self-service model that lets developers use their existing tools and processes to ask for infrastructure and automate the provisioning and configuration for the platform team —all without having to learn new tools or build cumbersome new workflows. This translates to fewer misconfigurations, better cost management, and fewer security issues.

In this post, we’ve walked through the Spacelift ServiceNow integration and how you can use it, but this is just the beginning. 

If you are interested in learning more about Spacelift, book a demo with one of our engineers.