We’ve all heard it before. Mark Zuckerberg’s now infamous statement, “move fast and break things.” The motto of a college dorm room developer ended up succinctly encapsulating the mindset of a startup movement. This is not your parent’s code. This is hacker’s code. And to get to market quickly, we tolerate a few bugs along the way, because the most important goal is getting product into users hands. We’ll be able to fix, rapidly iterate, and evolve along the way.
Fast forward to today, and we no longer see a startup and a scrappy college kid, but a mature global Fortune 500 software development organization. So does that hacker mantra of rapid speed and innovation, at all costs, still apply or is it mere nostalgia?
It’s complicated.
A lot can change between University Avenue and Wall Street
The hacker mentality and moving fast is deeply embedded in Facebook’s history and their culture. There are nods to it all over their corporate identity - their corporate address is 1 Hacker Way and their career site mentions moving fast and hacking. But the reality is, in order to get from the college dorm room to Wall Street, Zuckerberg and Facebook had to mature their software development organization processes, and along with that, their brazen call-to-arms. In 2014, a familiar, but modified ethos was revealed at Facebook’s annual F8 conference: “move fast with stable infra.”
“Because when you build something that you don’t have to fix 10 times, you can move forward on top of what you’ve built.”
Mark Zuckerberg
Enter the “move fast with stable infra” era
Around this time, Facebook had close to 1B users and a very healthy stream of advertising revenue to protect. With thousands of developers now contributing to a codebase, it was no longer acceptable to have a few bugs or a crash here or there.
What Facebook and many other top performing software delivery organizations recognized is that in order to survive today’s users’ growing digital savviness and UX demands, software organizations, at scale, must prioritize speed and stability. According to the 2019 Accelerate: The State of DevOps Report, delivering software quickly, reliably, and safely is at the heart of technology transformation and organization performance. Today’s top performing software delivery organizations are:
Deploying code 208 times more
Making the time from commit to deploy 106 times faster
Recovering from incidents 2,604 times faster
Lowering change failure by 7 times
So how do you get from breaking things to stable infra?
At CloudBees, we already help your developers with their CI/CD pipelines, so they can quickly deliver innovation and deploy code at the same rate as the top performing software organizations. However, with more code deploys comes more changes to the IT infrastructure, processes, documentation, etc. Changes have the potential to cause an incident which can disrupt the value chain to the customer.
This is where ITSM comes in
ITSM stands for IT Service Management, and it’s a set of processes, policies and procedures that manage the delivery and implementation of IT services to your customers. There are over 100 tools that support an ITSM process - like ServiceNow, Jira, or Service Desk. These tools free your developers from having to track and chase down changes and incidents in disparate systems. So, to keep your developers creating and shipping code in the systems of their choice, we’ve created our first of many ITSM integrations with best-in-class provider ServiceNow’s Change and Incident Management Solution.
How does the ServiceNow Plugin work
Our ServiceNow Change and Incident Management integration is a CloudBees Tier 1 and ServiceNow approved plugin. It seamlessly connects a developers CloudBees CI pipelines with operations ITSM systems. When they’re ready to deploy their changes to an IT system, a change request is automatically submitted to ServiceNow’s Change Management system. No additional work on the developer’s side, and if an issue arises, an incident ticket is immediately created and assigned to the appropriate personnel for a quick resolution. No more wasted time trying to track down the origin of a bug or system failure.
Embolden your developers to work where they want to be working, their CloudBees CI pipelines, and give your ITSM folks visibility into development without having to leave ServiceNow.
Speed and innovation don’t have to be slowed down by incidents. Stop breaking stuff today.
See it in action
A special shout-out to David Schott and Deepro Basu for the role they played in bringing this ServiceNow plugin to fruition!
Learn more about CloudBees CI today.