2 Tribes – Can DevOps and ITIL Play Nicely?

The DevOps community is growing fast, and there are many grassroots meetups taking place around the globe. I have wanted to attend my nearest event, Leeds DevOps, for some time. When they invited me to speak at their March 2016 event, I couldn’t say no!

A lot of the industry coverage of ITIL and DevOps presents them as two ends of the spectrum that can’t work well together. My presentation looked at how, in fact, DevOps and ITIL should complement each other and what DevOps can learn from ITIL.

If you’d like to discuss DevOps and ITIL or have a view on how they work together, please let me know in the comments or get in touch.

Claire Agutter

DevOps Leeds

DevOps Leeds is an after work event with a mix of formal presentations and informal networking. This meeting was held at ODI Leeds, kindly sponsored by Infinity Works.

The meeting was hosted by Andy Burgin, and included my presentation plus one from popular speaker Gwen Diagram.

There were about 60 attendees, and I was pleased to see a mix of Ops and Dev in the room, plus a few service management people too.

Is Test Causing Your Live Problems?

Gwen Diagram did a fast paced, funny presentation on some common problems with test environments and how to take the fear out of deployments.   Her slides were some of the most entertaining I’ve seen.

Gwen Diagram's slides

DevOps and ITIL

In my presentation, I focused on some DevOps and ITIL history, looking at perceptions in the two areas and trying to bust some myths. ITIL is often presented as bureaucratic and a block to progress, but it’s also how IT is ‘done’ in many larger enterprises.

Claire's presentation gets started

DevOps can seem scary and technology led to an outsider, but in fact both DevOps and ITIL should be focused on one thing – giving the business what it wants, in the right timescale and in a working state.

I looked at how applying an Agile mindset to IT service management implementation can result in more effective processes, and what that might mean for commonly adopted processes like change, incident and problem management.

I also looked at some lessons from ITIL. For example, many organisations thought ITIL was a ‘silver bullet’ that would fix all of their issues, then got frustrated when that wasn’t the case. Companies that are adopting DevOps need to make sure they are doing it for the right reasons and to enable business outcomes, not just because DevOps is cool.

DevOps Community

DevOps Leeds was a fantastic event and it was great to see so many passionate people there. I’ll definitely be back at their next event in April, and also hope to attend DevOps Sheffield very soon.