Devops: It is Not About ITIL, It is About Proficiency
As you would expect, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) topic was brought up in the devops day held last Friday in a LinkedIn facility in Mountain View, CA. We, of course, had the expected spectrum of opinions about ITIL in the context of devops – from “ITIL will never work for a true continuous development shop” to “well, you can make ITIL work under such circumstances.” Needless to say, a noticeable level of passion accompanied these two statements…
IMHO the heart of the issue is not ITIL per se but system management proficiency. If your system management proficiency is high, you are likely to be able to effectively respond to 10, 20 or 50 deploys per day. Conversely, if your system management proficiency is low, ops is not likely to be able to cope with high velocity in dev. The critical piece is alignment of velocities between dev and ops, not the method used to manage IT systems and services. Whether you use ITIL, COBIT or your own home-grown set of best practices is irrelevant. Achieving alignment of velocities between dev and ops is a matter of proficiency in system management.
ITIL should really be thought of as a control model and a common language for process integration.
If your ITIL process are bureaucratic and heavyweight, they’ll restrict or choke continiuous deployments. If they are lightweight and modeled for agility, they’ll faciliate the desired control even when revved to high velocity.
Ray Riescher
June 29, 2010 at 9:44 am
I could not agree more.
Israel
israelgat
June 29, 2010 at 9:55 am