ITIL and DevOps: Practical Tips for Converging ITIL and DevOps with ElectricFlow and ServiceNow

Presented at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016, November 7-9 in San Francisco.

While ITIL may have gotten a bad rep lately (for being too slow, or bureaucratic), there’s no denying it is essential – and deeply rooted – in the IT operations of many large-scale enterprises.

ITIL (fka Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has been around for a long time, and has helped large teams – particularly in industries that are heavily regulated – manage the way IT services are delivered in a predictable and consistent way.

• Can ITIL and DevOps work together, towards a shared goal of quality releases, while ensuring governance, auditability, and mitigating the risk of failed releases?
• How can teams who already subscribe to an ITIL way of working adopt DevOps practices?
• How can ITIL processes for Incident management and Change Management be adapted to an Agile/DevOps way of thinking?

Our customers show that the ITIL and DevOps are not mutually exclusive, and that they can work together – and deliver!

This talk focuses on processes and specific tooling and integrations for supporting the ITIL/DevOps hybrid in your organization:

• How to bridge the gap between ITSM and Continuous Delivery in your team’s day-to-day processes?
• How to automate the information gathering and data flow between your ITIL toolset – such as ServiceNow – and the DevOps Automation platforms – ElectricFlow.
• Tips and best practices for meeting audit and security requirements, change management procedures, while speeding-up delivery – both for internal IT customers and end users.

Transcript

1. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 ITIL And DevOps Chris Fulton, Global Technical Account Manager, Electric Cloud @cfulton81
2. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 ITIL, ITSM, and DevOps
3. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 How does process fit into DevOps? • Getting “stuck” in change management • How do you stop “waiting for approvals” • Should you automate certain approvals?
4. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Getting out of waiting for approvals • Categorize changes  High / Medium / Low • Automate information • Get “humans” out of the business of creating change tickets • Auto-approve low risk changes, if no dependency
5. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 High Risk Changes • Contain lots of dependencies • Could bring down many applications • These changes might be suited for a traditional “change” process with human intervention
6. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Medium/Low risk changes • Have verifiable test coverage • Have verifiable pipeline and demonstrated they have worked in lower environments • Repeatable changes that have been done before • Still document and log every step, but auto approve
7. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Continuous Integration for Process • Automate the process from “approved” to deploying to an environment • Keep logs of everything (done for you in ElectricFlow™)
8. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Practical Example
9. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Example of DevOps and ITIL process
10. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 ElectricFlow™ Environment
11. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 ElectricFlow™ Pipeline
12. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Process Explained
13. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 ElectricFlow™ Service Now Plugin Bi-directional communication plugin ElectricFlow connects IT Service Management processes with scalable DevOps Release Automation
14. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Final Thoughts
15. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 Automating Process • Think about what a machine can do • Have easily obtainable logs • Do not put in place unnecessary gates
16. electric-cloud.com #DOES16 DevOps and ITIL can and SHOULD work together
17. Thank you! blog: electric-cloud.com/blog twitter: @electriccloud Christopher Fulton cfulton@electric-cloud.com