AWS Cloud Map vs ServiceNow Discovery comparison

AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. With Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, and it maintains the updated location of these dynamically changing resources. This increases your application availability because your web service always discovers the most up-to-date locations of its resources.

Modern applications are typically composed of multiple services that are accessible over an API and perform a specific function. Each service interacts with a variety of other resources, such as databases, queues, object stores, and customer-defined microservices, and it needs to be able to find the location of all the infrastructure resources on which it depends in order to function. In most cases, you manage all these resource names and their locations manually within the application code. However, manual resource management becomes time consuming and error-prone as the number of dependent infrastructure resources increases or the number of microservices dynamically scale up and down based on traffic. You can also use third-party service discovery products, but this requires installing and managing additional software and infrastructure.

Cloud Map allows you to register any application resources, such as databases, queues, microservices, and other cloud resources, with custom names. Cloud Map then constantly checks the health of resources to make sure the location is up-to-date. The application can then query the registry for the location of the resources needed based on the application version and deployment environment.

ServiceNow Discovery finds applications and devices on your network, and then updates the CMDB with the information it finds. Discovery is available as a separate subscription from the rest of the Now Platform.