Is ITIL Fit For Purpose For DevOps?
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ITIL and whether or not it is fit for purpose for DevOps. The logic I keep hearing goes like this – you shouldn't confuse the ITIL approach with the implementation; the ITIL approach is building blocks; these building blocks are easily applied to DevOps. I’m not convinced. First, ITIL is fundamentally time bound. For example, ITIL v1 was primarily around applying mainframe disciplines into the emerging world of Client/Server, ITIL v2 was more about ensuring quality of output across complex operations environments and ITIL v3 was more about consolidating established operations principles and shifting the focus to “how does IT contribute to business value?” Isn’t it a stretch to make best practices for previous waves of technology apply to DevOps whereby infrastructure and operations professionals are not silo’d but play an active part in delivering customer products and services along with application developers? Second, ITIL zealots are convinced that these ITIL “best practices” are some kind of complex baking recipe and if all steps are not followed to the letter, the end result will be a failure. This means that for many, the approach and the implementation of ITIL is tied. This leads me to my question: Is ITIL fit for purpose for DevOps? To return to the analogy of building blocks, let’s use the ultimate of building blocks – Legos. When I think about ITIL and service management, what most enterprises have implemented, looks like this: