| | July 20178CIOReviewIrecently read a blog post titled something like "the death of ITIL." The essence of the post was the suggestion that DevOps would essentially supplant the role of ITIL in high functioning organizations. Reading the blog post made me realize that the state of confusion around what DevOps is (and isn't) might have finally reached its apex.At risk of gross oversimplification, DevOps is a paradigm shift toward a few key things:· Developers are no longer cordoned off outside the circle of operational trust. With DevOps, developers and operations professionals become integrated as a single, cohesive development (Dev) and operations (Ops) team· Well-implemented DevOps shops make heavy use of infrastructure as code (i.e. infrastructure automation via APIs, such as with Amazon AWS, Google GCE, etc.). But to be clear, while the advent of public cloud services has made the traditional role of `a subset' of dedicated infrastructure operators less relevant in shops that have made the shift to operating entirely in public cloud environments (such as the engineers that have responsibility for the deployment of bare metal servers or VMs), it does not eliminate the need for the infrastructure engineers that build and manage the underlying cloud stack behind the API curtain, or the engineers that design and manage cloud infrastructures above the metal tier· DevOps moves us toward a single code base that encompasses software, middleware, and the underlying operating environment --it represents a move toward converging what were historically disparate systems, in terms of how they were managed, their release cycle, control model, etc. It espouses multiple disciplines working together, in a well-integrated delivery model, to deliver value to the business· It's all about speed/time to market-DevOps enables Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and CI/CD enables speed to market. ITIL is often associated with stodgy old IT shops where the delivery model is to treat developers like second class citizens and to require that people submit a ticket and wait in line for everything--an innovation killer. But this view misses the mark entirely· Point of clarity: DevOps is not "NoOps." The latter is a mostly-dead idea that's used to describe shops that have migrated to (or were born in) a pure cloud-services model and have no dedicated operations personnel. What companies quickly learn, however, is that not having dedicated infrastructure and operations professionals (whether or not a shop hosts metal) doesn't scale well beyond early startup--stability, regulatory compliance, operational controls, etc. are a necessary "thing" regardless of the operational model a company uses. These functions require expertise, experience, and focus that is typically outside the realm and interest of developersDevOps emerged out of necessity in startups that operated in public cloud services from inception. Developers were obviously required to create the technologies that would enable (or represent the core of) the business, and all of the precious little funding that startups typically have is directed at delivering client-facing capabilities. But what about dedicated infrastructure people? Not required in an all-public-cloud world, particularly at startup ITIL and DevOps - Archenemies or Complementary Models?By Dave Blodgett, Managing Director, CIO & CISO, HedgeServIN MY OPINION
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