DevOps is a recent movement in the world of technologies; it was created about six years ago, but really took off in the last two years. This movement aims at the alignment of all the development teams and those of operations. Those two forces were previously often in conflict due to the nature of their work.

This new movement made 1, 9 billion dollars in 2014; Gartner estimates that the DevOps technologies market could reach 2, 3 billion dollars this year.

Furthermore, several companies using an agile project management method adopted the DevOps movement without really seizing the vast of it. Despite the fact that the agile method is not directly connected to this movement, it does help with the implementation of the latter of the organization. According to Gartner,   we now count, 25 % of the 2000 biggest world groups that massively turned to this approach.

The ultimate purpose of this approach is to reach the necessary agility to allow the fast deployment of new services.

The upsides of this movement

•  An improved stability of the environments
•  A faster delivery of the expectations
•  A quicker and less complex problem resolutions 
•  New and more frequent features supplied
• A decrease of resource time needed (a reduction of the correction/maintenance time)

And the downsides

·Expectations that differ from management in regards to the development and operations department. The quality is often left aside for the benefit of fast and speedy execution.

·The reluctance to change is a problem known and generalized in all companies. The solution to ease the impact of this problem is to communicate changes in a clear and adequate way. As the movement is new, the implementation of DevOps often faces this resistance.

·A rigid structure, established by binding processes slows down the development (too many QAs, management change process with too many approvals, heavy documentations) however; a structure that is too flexible will also have negative effects on the implementation of the movement because the lack of structures reduces the teams’ alignment.

Easily set up this approach, with these 5 steps

1. Regular application deployment.

2. Test everything and often.

3. Make tests in an environment similar to your production environment.

4. Get fast user feedbacks.

5. An increase supervision of the operation and production quality calculated and updated with metrics and key indicators.

As the optic is to deliver the changes quickly, the process should be automated to a maximum. This will have an increasing effect on product liability and its stability while reducing the risk of human error.

How to integrate the processes in an ITIL optimal way

To integrate the DevOps method into an organization where the ITIL best practices are well implemented, it is essential to follow certain phases to increase your return on investment while maximizing collaboration and automation.

1. Identify your company ITIL processes and prioritize them by importance

2. Identify the potential fields of improvement for every process

3. Ask how and if an improved collaboration and automation be beneficial?

4. Prioritize the efforts on availability and ROI

Everything will be fine

As there is no DevOps training, several online communities were formed to share best practices between the followers of this movement. DevOps is that complicated after all, if you prioritize your initiatives according to the improvements you want to bring your production and operation processes and that you implement a continuous flow of communication between the teams, everything will go off very smoothly.