- [Instructor] ITIL specifies four functions,
four organizational units or departments
that must be in place if you're doing service management.
These are the service desk, IT operations management,
applications management, and, lastly, technical management.
Let's have a look at the intersection
of these four ITIL-driven functions in DevOps.
It's important to note that in ITIL,
these functions are made up not just of people,
but also of automation.
For example, as in the service desk
and its self-service portal.
Functions can range from totally manual
to completely automated in nature.
Before we get into the specifics
of each ITIL-driven function,
I want to mention here that across the board,
the level of automation in functions is higher
in a DevOps mode, with much more work
of the function being completed through automation.
Nowhere is this more evidence than in the service desk.
In an ITIL-driven shop,
the service desk is the single point of contact for users
for handling incidents, service requests,
some categories of change.
It's the concentration point of communication with users
and a coordination point for many IT groups and processes.
Consider Office 365.
There is automation providing self-service in the front end
and scripting on the back end providing fulfillment.
You don't get a human.
This eliminates delays and unnecessary complexity.
It requires relentless automation on the front and back end.
This is a good model
for how the service desk should function in a DevOps mode.
Some things you can do with an ITIL-driven service desk
for DevOps include putting public status pages up
on the self-service portal
and practicing relentless automation on the back end
to move towards self-service
and full automation for incident and request handling
using chatbots and the like,
and also considering chat-based support.
In an ITIL-driven shop,
the technical management function is the department
that owns the technology streams,
the infrastructure engineering.
They own choice of architecture and standards
for client and server platforms,
hardware, software, and direction for those,
both the choice of these streams
and futures and strategies and such,
as well as upper tier support for those streams
in incident management and the like.
You may know this as infrastructure engineering.
DevOps aspects that have a clear large impact
on technical management functions
include continuous delivery, infrastructure automation,
site reliability engineering, the cloud,
Chaos Monkey, and the DevOps toolchain.
A key thing to know about the technical management function
in a DevOps mode is that the technical infrastructure
is more code-based.
The way of working is a federated model
where technical management sets the pattern and standards,
but Dev teams are out there on their own
to deploy and align against those standards
and consume those patterns.
So the role of infrastructure engineering shifts
from managing the actual offering
to managing the box Dev teams get to pick from.
In ITIL, application management is the function
or department that both develops
and supports applications through their life cycle.
Application management stands in contrast
to more traditional application development
which is project-oriented
and focuses on functional requirements
and not operational-oriented
and focusing on health models
and nonfunctional requirements.
You know, the ilities, like availability,
capacity, and such that operations concerns itself with.
On the surface, ITIL's description
of application management is very DevOpsy,
especially for a concept coming from ITIL v3 circa 2007.
But there are differences in pace
and how services, feature sets,
and features get deployed and rolled back,
how they get scaled up and down through automation,
and at what pace, faster,
and then the typical payload sizes, smaller,
features, then feature sets, then services.
It'd be fair to say that all DevOps concepts
impact application management,
so really the choice here is where to start.
For starters, in DevOps mode application management,
you'll have to have a much stronger plan for automation.
Also, the volume of what to monitor is much larger,
given that you'll have to automate monitoring
and be really good at alerting,
sorting out what really must be seen
and acted on and by whom.
IT operations management is the department
that executes day-to-day operational activities,
running batch jobs, monitoring job streams,
monitoring systems, application services,
doing backups and restores, all that sort of stuff
which ITIL causes IT operations control.
It also has facilities management,
things like power, cooling, airflow.
These are typically the data center
or network operations or service operation center folks.
The aim here is for efficient and effective use of resources
in carrying out day-to-day operations
and delivery of services.
The first thing that should be apparent is
that the facilities management portion
of the IT operations function goes away
as your platform shifts
from on-premise to hybrid to cloud.
The IT operations control portion,
the eyeballs on the consoles and the like, remains.
One thing you can do at this intersection is
to make sure your Ops team are online
in your ChatOps ecosystem.