Since New York version, ServiceNow CPG integrates with Terraform to provision resources easily into the different cloud providers. This integration aims at simplifying the process of catalog item creation. In this approach, Servicenow is considered as the end user portal with governance and control capabilities while terraform has the IAC provisioning logic.

This new architecture enables the different personas to share responsibilities and to scale when cloud offerings are always changing. Here the different roles I see in this new approach:

- Cloud designer: This persona is in charge of building and maintaining the terraform templates that own the information on what and how resources are deployed into the cloud providers

- Cloud administrator: this persona is in charge of consuming the previous templates into Servicenow CPG and applying governance and policy rules on top of them. He/she will have to consider strengthening the naming convention, implementing tagging logic and other types of rules (limit choice based on user group...)

- Cloud operator: This persona is in charge of "keeping the lights on" meaning monitoring the user stacks, following the tasks associated to each stack (manual or automatic), respond to incident, change and continuously improving the processes with post provisioning and Day-2 operations definition.

- Cloud end user: This persona will request the published catalog items. He/she needs to have full visibility on his/her stacks and processes. Communication with the cloud operator needs to be open and he/she needs to have access to Day-2 operations. The look and feel aspect of the portal is key and the users need to find the catalog items and their stacks easily and quickly

- Developer: When developer needs to include the creation of a new infrastructure for its application, he will request it by adapting its pipeline going through ServiceNow CPG API to guarantee the policies in place are respected.

Here a schema to better represent this organization:

With this team work in place, organizations can benefit of a better user experience and satisfaction, a full coverage of cloud offerings and capabilities, an end to end control and traceability of user resources and budget and finally a continuous improvement approach to enable teams to standardize and scale their processes.

Here's a video illustrating the cloud end user and the cloud operator roles in this architecture:

Cloud End User profile demo