Personal Developer Instance
Ever since personal developer instances were introduced, the ServiceNow developer community has had a complicated relationship with them. We give them out for free but we don’t have infinite capacity so at points we have run out of them. We introduced hibernation to allow us to fit more on the same set of infrastructure. They do expire after 10 days of disuse, and this continues to happen.
However We have introduced a new feature in the program.
Madrid is here! In keeping with our twice a year tradition, we are excited to announce early access for the Madrid release!
New for Developers in Madrid Agent Workspace - configurable service desk application interface Automated Test Framework - Smart Suites, Quick Start tests, Parameterized tests Flow Designer - Decision Trees, run as, looping, improved APIs Mobile Studio - for building Applets along with new mobile applications Those are just a few of the highlights you will find in the Madrid ServiceNow release.
London is here! In keeping with our twice a year tradition, it is early access time for the London release!
To get your hands on a London instance, you have a few options:
If you already have an instance You can upgrade it. From the Developer Portal, click Manage > Instance in the navigation bar. From there, click the Action dropdown and click Upgrade to London.
If you don’t have an instance From the Manage > Instance page, click Request Instance.
It’s time for Kingston! As always, developers can participate in Early Access and can start requesting Kingston instances from the Developer Portal as of now.
To get your hands on a Kingston instance, you have a few options:
If you already have an instance You can upgrade it. From the Developer Portal, click Manage > Instance in the navigation bar. From there, click the Action dropdown and click Upgrade to Kingston.
I’ll start with the good stuff. Starting with Jakarta, SNI is supported! If you need to enable it, create a system property named glide.outbound.tls_sni.enabled and set the value to true. After you set this property, it make take up to 30 seconds for the change to take effect. If you’re using a MID server, create a MID server property with the same name and restart the MID Server.
If you don’t know what SNI is, don’t worry, you’re not alone.
I note from answering feedback on the Developer Portal that some fraction of developers seem to be confused by the emails informing them that their Personal Developer Instance is upgrading. Usually these are patch releases such as the current update to Istanbul Patch 5 Hot Fix 1 that is presently rolling through our server farm.
1) What does this mean?
Those notices are a warning that you will have a period of downtime, somewhere between 60 and 120 minutes, and that it would be a good idea to backup important work to you to hedge against the small chance of a problem.
Did you know that you can enable Multi-Factor Authentication on your Personal Developer Instance in only a few minutes? It is true. We recently published a video that walks through the couple of simple steps.
It breaks down to this:
Log in to your developer instance (or request one at the Developer Portal if you don’t already have one) Enable the Integration - Multifactor Authentication plugin on your instance. Go to the Multi-Factor Authentication properties and enable it.
Update: An up to date version of this article has been published here
One of the ongoing issues that we deal with in the Developer Program is the continuity of the free developer instances. No matter how well intentioned you are, it is always possible to have a time period where you are out of the office and miss the email about your Developer Instance expiring. I don’t like the idea of anyone losing their work but there is only so much we can do to prevent it.
One of the most requested features of the Developer Program is the ability to choose the version of a developer instance that one gets assigned. The current state of affairs is that you request an instance, are assigned a random one from the available instances. If you choose you can upgrade from there but it is difficult to go downwards once you do that. Some people want specific versions of an instance to match the training documentation they have, or to match production at their workplace or a client.
When we answer the feedback from the Developer portal, the biggest single topic are questions related to the developer instances. The bulk of these break down into one of two buckets:
1) My instance was reclaimed from inactivity - how can I get that restored?
2) I want to request an instance but it says none are available. Now what?
Let’s look at both of those situations with some tips on avoiding negative impact on your development experience.
