Developer Program
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 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.
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.
Photo by Metassus, licensed CC BY 2.0
The Developer Program has grown steadily since it was announced at Knowledge15, and along with that growth has been a corresponding increase in developer instance usage. The ability to give these away for free use for the community of ServiceNow developers is a great benefit and has reaped benefits for the entire ecosystem. However, it does come at a cost. The program was granted a dedicated chunk of infrastructure, and then another chunk later.
2016 Developer Survey Thank you to the 2,646 developers that responded to the survey that was conducted in January. We appreciate the time, feedback and the insights you provided us. This information will play a vital role in continuing to shape the Developer Program around your needs.
Below is an infographic of the results followed by a more detailed explanation of each section. Please give us your comments and thoughts below as well.
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.
