The Now Platform® San Diego release is generally available (GA) with many new enhancements to help people work faster, easier, and more efficiently. I’m excited that GA day is here, I know my team helped deliver another great release.
In my career as a ServiceNow upgrade program manager, I have managed upgrades for 13 releases — three as a customer and 10 within ServiceNow. Overall, on GA day, my team’s work is complete, and we’re already preparing for the next release. A lot of work was going on behind the scenes in the months before GA.
What does it mean to be zero customer
At ServiceNow, we pride ourselves on using our own products internally, a program we refer to as Now on Now. As customer zero for our products, ServiceNow internal teams — including IT operations, product engineering, cloud operations, and Now Support — upgraded to the new platform release in the sub-production and production environment within six months prior to GA .
Being customer zero gives our teams the opportunity to provide feedback to the product team during the development process. Our testing includes areas such as performance, reporting, user experience, and upgrade times to help improve the release.
This approach gives the development team time to correct many of the issues prior to GA so they don’t encounter customers. The result? Our customers get the best experience possible.
In upgrading San Diego
For the San Diego release, two internal instances, Now Support and product engineering, were upgraded in September/October 2021. Four upgrade teams performed a total of 23 planned upgrades over the past six months. Click the image to see a detailed infographic.
Accessibility note: The infographic is transcribed at the end of this blog.
My team, Now Support, has been running the San Diego release for six months. We conducted more than 11,000 automated tests and completed four rounds of testing, identifying several issues that were fixed prior to GA.
The Now Support upgrade process is 2.5 weeks from development to production. This includes creating the build, testing it in the sub-prod, fixing issues, validating the fixes, and upgrading our production instance.
Tips for a better upgrade experience
When I completed 10 cycles of upgrading in my tenure at ServiceNow, I learned a few lessons to help things go smoothly. Here are some tips for anyone who wants to improve the upgrade experience.
1. Treat each upgrade as a separate project with a detailed plan that includes resourcing, scheduling, and communications. Be sure to specify any new features you want to implement as part of the upgrade.
2. Reduce test time by using automated tests. We reward our testers with treats — chocolate and ice cream are the favorites on my team.
3. Schedule upgrades for slow traffic hours to reduce user impact.
4. Schedule retrospectives after each upgrade to identify and implement process improvements.
5. Ask for support if you have questions. There may be a relevant knowledge base article or community forum discussion on the topic. If not, log a case.
Upgrades can be easy and fun
With an average of three to four pre-GA upgrades per release, my team has successfully completed over 40 Now Support upgrades and consumed many boxes of chocolates.
As we celebrate San Diego GA, we’re preparing to try out in Tokyo, which is targeted for September GA.
I realize that my eagerness for GA day is not about release availability. It’s about knowing that we’ve done everything we can to make our customers ’experience better. That’s all it’s worth.
Get your upgrade kit and other resources.
Transcript of the infographic
Today Platform® San Diego released:
Drinking our own champagne to connect people and systems throughout the company
ServiceNow was upgraded to a San Diego release beginning in late Q3 2021, before it became available to customers. Our upgrade teams offer ongoing feedback to product development teams so they can deliver stronger, more reliable product capabilities and enable faster, easier upgrades for our customers and partners.
205 bugs were found before general availability1,2,3,4
The first upgrade was on Sept. 1 in the engineering sub-prod environment
San Diego release day
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Support Now – 179 sub -prod, 160 production
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Engineering – 203 sub -prod, 190 production
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Global Cloud Ops – 75 sub -prod, 0 production
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IT Ops – 87 sub -prod, 18 production
23 total planned upgrades1,2,3,4
9% faster upgrade time compared to Rome3
~ 79K automated tests in 25 rounds1,2,3,4
1 Now Support
2 Global Cloud Ops
3 Engineering
4 IT Ops
Learn more about Now on Now at www.servicenow.com/nowonnow
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