Recently, I came across an article that says that “DevOps is opposite to ITIL”.

To be frank, I never thought DevOps to be the opposite of ITIL. The argument in the article was that ITIL is slow, and DevOps is faster, which meets one of the current IT business goals;

• Reduce Time to Market
• Reduce Operational Cost
• Increase efficiencies

Whereas ITIL has so many steps that it is slowing the “go to market” speed.

To me, DevOps still does require checks & balances and security gatekeepers, and traceability, which is one of the few key thoughts around ITIL. The major difference I believe is “automation”. When ITIL was initially thought through and established, automation was still available in various forms and shapes, but it was seen as very top-level IT skills and looked at as not that easy to implement. For that, process and people became more important and somewhat it brought a bit more complexity and speed.

However, with tools like ansible, terraform, and so on, I believe, a few steps of the ITIL could be speedup through automation.

Again, I still don’t see the argument of DevOps <-> ITIL. As I said, even speed-wise I don’t think the argument exists.

To me, the important part of this day and age is that, with any enterprise, for security reasons, audibility, and traceability, make sure you build proper checks and balances into your DevOps practices, which you should be able to learn a thing or two from the ITIL practices.