ITIL Vs Devops

With the increasing usage of the term Devops in today’s environment, many often ask if Devops and ITIL are in conflict. As per Wikipedia Devops  (“DEVelopment and OPerationS") is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes, while ITIL is an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which is a set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services (operations) with the needs of business.

I would like to term Devops as a new philosophy which links the agile means of software development to its implementation in a live or operational environment. Both Devops and ITIL are products of the era in which they originated. ITIL originated in the late 80’s at a time when it was realized that there was a growing dependence of organizations on IT, and it was imperative to have standard practises in place to manage. It was also a time of the waterfall method of software development, highly planned and controlled development environments.  

In a world where timelines are reducing and there is a need to effect countless changes in services sooner, rather than later, from development to deployment and operations, we have seen the evolution of the Devops philosophy.

In the words of Adriaan De Jong, co-author of "The Manager's Guide to Continuous Delivery”, Devops is “ Multi-Disciplinary Teams, who take end-to-end responsibility to deliver customer value early and often while continuously improving their process.”    

There are those who are proponents of using ITIL with DevOps. In the words of Gene Kim, co-author of the “The Phoenix Project”; “The DevOps Movement fits perfectly with ITSM.”  Adding further he says “ITIL and ITSM still are best codifications of the business processes that underpin IT operations, and actually describe many of the capabilities needed into order for IT operations to support a DevOps-style work stream.” Phil Tee, CEO and co-founder of Moogsoft, states further “ITIL is not in conflict with DevOps, but it must be adapted to DevOps practices in order to define clearly where issues arise and how to solve problems efficiently.”

While there are critics of ITIL who chafe at the sequential and plan-centric approach of ITIL, Kaimar Karu the head of the ITSM practise at Axelos, the owners of the ITIL Framework, says “Processes don’t remove the need for common sense, the way to ensure the process is both fit for use and fit for purpose is to ask: ‘What is the simplest process I could design that would support the control requirements while ensuring that customer value is created?’

In conclusion; one can think of the adoption of DevOps practices within the ITIL aligned Enterprise as an evolution from an orderly system based on processes to a system geared to facing the real-time challenges for speedy implementation of services. By using your ITIL processes as starting points for analysis of potential benefits, an Enterprise DevOps implementation can give great focus. It can identify pain points that could benefit from greater collaboration and automation.