App Engine Management Center

#AEMC , #App Engine Management Center , #Tokyo

Lauren McManamon

4 minute read

The San Diego release of ServiceNow heralded in the “single pane of glass” for developer admins - App Engine Management Center. With an entire release now under its belt, “AEMC” has seen some major improvements made for Tokyo, and we want to highlight them for you here today!

Rather Listen or Watch Instead of Read?

If blogs aren’t your jam, do not fret! For fans of Chuck Tomasi’s Break Point Podcast, he hosted Principle Inbound Product Manager, Brooks Hawkins, to discuss Tokyo’s App Engine Management Center in depth. In addition to that, the Developer Advocates hosted a Creator Toolbox livestream on our YouTube channel (also featuring Brooks) to demo these new features. The links to all of this is directly below.

Hold Up - What is App Engine Management Center?

With our platform supporting customers running N-1 versions, this may be a lot of people’s first time hearing about AEMC.

Simply put - Running off of a customer’s developer instance(s), App Engine Management Center (AEMC) is a tool for IT admins and developers alike to get a comprehensive view and means of managing all of the custom app development activities. The entire lifecycle of an app, from ideation to pushing it to production, can be intimately observed and coordinated from this single location.

Unliked the bi-yearly version releases of our platform and workflow clouds (e.g. San Diego, Tokyo, etc.), AEMC has the benefit of being an independent ServiceNow Store app. This allows for more frequent releases asynchronous with the former’s deployment schedule. For example, SAFE HARBOR SAFE HARBOR SAFE HARBOR - there is another version of AEMC slotted to release as early as November!

As of September 2022, AEMC is a feature exclusive to stand-alone App Engine license.

With That Out of the Way, What Are the Tokyo Updates?

App & Developer Visibility

One of the main goals with the creation of AEMC was developer visibility. Observability into the entire lifecycle of an app and beyond! Well, with just its second version, the AEMC has extended farther into the “beyond” than I had anticipated!

First and foremost, AEMC now has deeper insight into all of the custom apps that exist across every instance. Clicking through the various environments allows an admin to see the apps themselves, all of their details and subentities, and their comprehensive history.

However, the fun doesn’t stop there. The improvement that really piqued my attention was the expansion into developer visibility. Citizen development has a history of being a double edged sword - allowing people to build fast but usually with unmitigated control and governance.

The new developer visibility page helps remove that anxiety, showing at any given time the amount of people that could be a developer. It shows how many are active, where they all are spread out within the organization, and clicking on an individual’s page shows their entire history of requests and actions.

Developer Home Developer Details

Configurable Pipelines

The “belle of the ball” for development in the Rome release was the debut of Pipelines. Wrangling together Flow Designer, the CI/CD spoke, and the ServiceNow App Repo, our DevOps team produced a product that put a process around the concept of going live on ServiceNow. Pipelines allowed for new apps to follow a traceable, predictable process of approvals, ATF tests, and instance scans to ensure the highest probability of success.

However, imagine this scenario - you need to change a Field Style from “red” to “orange.” That’s it. A simple field color change, and in spite of the simplicity it would still have to follow the same, rigorous process of a new version launch. Pipelines were amazing, but not flexible.

As of the Tokyo release, from AEMC Pipelines become a configurable asset. Produced using a Guided Setup wizard, admins can create multiple paths for apps to follow on their journey to production and the process around each path. Not only that, but all of the notes from the deployment will be auto-added to each deployment request, so at any point in time your team can review if the Pipepline process is adequate.

AEMC View of Pipelines Setup of Pipelines

Parting Words

We hope you are as, if not more, excited for AEMC and these new improvement as we are! For all other content regarding the Tokyo release, please visit our Tokyo Content Calendar here. Cheers~!

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