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Owner: IBM Version 1.0 Subject: IT Service Management for DevOps Page 1 of 15

IT Service Management Reference Architecture Series

IT Service Management for DevOps

Version number: 1.0

Final as of: 23 Nov 2015

Classification: Public

Printed on: 28 Jan 2016

Author(s): Robert Hodges ([email protected])

Solution Architecture IBM Systems - Middleware

Co-Author(s) Isabell Sippli Oliver Kiess Ingo Boelke Sacha Mongrain Bradley Leonard

Sponsor: Ingo Averdunk ([email protected])

Distinguished Engineer CTO Client Success IBM Systems - Middleware


Contents

1. Executive Overview ................................................................................................ 3

2. Introduction – DevOps & IT Service Management .................................................. 4

2.1 Introduction to DevOps ................................................................................................................... 4

2.2 ITSM ................................................................................................................................................ 5

3. Considerations and Motivation (Business Value) ................................................... 6

4. Use cases ............................................................................................................... 7

4.1 Business Needs Require Faster Time-to-Market for Software ....................................................... 7

4.2 The Capabilities of DevOps are Required, Costs Must be Controlled ............................................ 7

4.3 Application Change and Configuration Management ..................................................................... 7

4.4 Application Performance Monitoring ............................................................................................... 7

4.5 Business Service Management ...................................................................................................... 8

4.6 Application Infrastructure Capacity Management ........................................................................... 8

4.7 Application Operation Automation .................................................................................................. 8

5. ITSM for DevOps Reference Architecture .............................................................. 9

5.1 DevOps capabilities and how ITSM can support them ................................................................. 10

6. Implementation Options ........................................................................................ 12

6.1 What or how should you start with ITSM for DevOps? ................................................................. 12

7. Summary .............................................................................................................. 14

8. References ........................................................................................................... 15


1. Executive Overview The implementation (or transition), to a DevOps development process (the integration of both development, operational teams and processes), has proven itself as an enabler to reducing time to release, improved automation of repetitive processes and a key component of agile development and release. While agile development has led to the increased focus and development of the DevOps model, DevOps is not an all-or-nothing change. DevOps can (and should), be introduced and implemented in traditional development environments where appropriate and the improvement can be measured.

However, DevOps is not a single technology, process or tool. While standards are being developed and matured such as SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), to embrace DevOps requires changes in how teams are structured, how responsibilities are shared and also the need to integrate and deliver services that enables the teams to be successful.

Along with the development solutions and processes, IT Service Management (ITSM) plays a key role in supporting DevOps practices and objectives such as incident management, deployment and application performance management to name but a few.

There are companies (IBM being one), with the portfolio and experience on the concepts, patterns for success and solutions that can assist your journey to DevOps maturity. For the purpose of this document, we are going to limit the discussion to the IT Service Management components and solutions IBM provides that enable or support DevOps integration and automation.


2. Introduction – DevOps & IT Service Management This whitepaper outlines the IT Service Management concepts required to enable DevOps ITSM support in an organization. It will provide key use cases, functional components, entry points and implementation strategy to support your DevOps journey. As an introduction, let’s define DevOps and IT Service Management in the context of DevOps support.

2.1 Introduction to DevOps

DevOps is defined as a software delivery approach aiming at delivering software in a continuous manner. This continuous delivery cycle enables the business to respond more quickly to new opportunities while getting continuous customer feedback.

In a time where businesses are under great pressure, and business innovation is often supported by software, IBM believes DevOps is a key means of achieving sustained innovation. As seen in the reference material at the end of this paper, IBM has seen significant improvements in software delivery and reduction of costs.

While often limited in scope to greater collaboration between development and operation teams, IBM defines DevOps more broadly to include all stakeholders involved in software delivery including business stakeholders, partners, customers, quality insurance teams, developers, etc.

Enabling DevOps in an organization can be challenging and is more successful when guided by established principles and reference architecture.

IBM has defined the following DevOps principles:

• Develop and test against production-like systems

• Deploy with repeatable, reliable processes

• Monitor and validate operational quality

• Amplify feedback loop

These principles are implemented by deploying core capabilities and practices such as:

- Continuous business planning, which ensures that business strategies, priorities and requirements are defined and continuously managed.

- Collaborative development, which allows diverse teams to construct software that is continuously integrated allowing for continuous testing of applications.

- Continuous release and deployment, to support the continuous deployment of software from development environment to QA and production to enable faster delivery of new features to customers.

- Continuous monitoring, to provide the required metrics for developers, testers and business stakeholders, enabling them to understand the performance and availability of their applications allowing for early feedback.

- Continuous customer feedback and optimization, which allows the organization to steer the priorities, plans and features throughout the development cycles, to deliver the right customer value and avoid costly errors early in the process.

To be successful, DevOps requires all teams to collaborate and to provide, gather and analyze feedback throughout the delivery life-cycle; therefore IT operations processes and tools are critical to enable efficient DevOps adoption in an organization.


2.2 ITSM

IT Service Management refers to the sum of processes and practices required to manage and support Information Technology services that are offered to customers (internal or external). ITSM practices are meant to support, in a vendor independent way, the full spectrum of IT services from network to application to complete business services. Service Management process framework and standards such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Business Process Framework (eTOM) or Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) have contributed to define standard operational procedures and supporting services within organizations, while providing quality and efficiency gain for IT Operations teams via a focus on continuous improvement

In today’s complex environments clients are challenged to deliver innovation and business value faster while optimizing operations. Operations teams often need to leverage cloud services and integrate them with their current assets to deliver with speed and agility required by DevOps approaches. Managing increased operational complexity, responding to new requirements and continuous changes are the key challenges that IT Service Management addresses, whilst providing operational feedback to the entire DevOps team.

IT Service Management plays a key role supporting DevOps practices and objectives, as follows:

• Configuration management ensures consistent environments across development, test and production.

• Incident Management enables timely corrective actions.

• Infrastructure and application performance management provides the continuous monitoring required for sustained application quality.

• Business service management provides business dashboards powered by analytics giving all stakeholders continuous business feedback allowing them to adjust their plans if necessary.

IT Service Management practices and tools enable and ensure consistent and reliable operation and feedback to all DevOps stakeholders. Without them, DevOps projects would be more difficult to steer in the continuously evolving direction business innovation needs. The following sections will present the IT Service Management business value, use case, architecture and deployment strategy to enable DevOps in an organization.


3. Considerations and Motivation (Business Value) With the rapid changes in the way that Business Services are delivered (from monolithic N-Tier to continuous delivery and mobile), there’s an ever increasing need for:

• Rapid development,

• Improved quality,

• Reduction in cost-to-deliver, along with

• Automation at every step to both improve speed and reduce errors.

DevOps was developed to address all of these issues.

With the integration of the development and operational teams and processes, plus continuous development and continuous testing, the instrumentation of application performance, statistical data, automated deployment and rollback have become intrinsic to the entire solution.

This leads to the business values of the DevOps solution and the use of IBM ITSM tools to support it:

1. Rapid development and deployment of applications to increase customer satisfaction; o Unlike the traditional waterfall process, DevOps allows for rapid incremental changes that

enable customer demands for new features to be rapidly met.

2. With continuous feedback throughout the entire process, there is increased ability to innovate since rapid releases into test environments allow for innovations to be tried and discarded if needed;

o Develop, test, measure, demonstrate and go no-go decisions can be made without huge investments with the ability easily to back out changes when needed.

3. Increased speed end-to-end. For development, testing, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and deployment, DevOps is specifically aligned to improve times for these processes. In the references within this document, IBM has seen 10X+ improvements of end-to-end speed in software delivery using the concepts and solutions explained herein.

o From the development process, to the testing, instrumentation and deployment of the application, integration and automation are intrinsic to the DevOps solution. This enables versions to go from ‘testing approved’ to full deployment in hours, versus multiple days often requiring tremendous manual effort.

All of these values apply to on-premise, off-premise or hybrid-cloud applications. DevOps is not just for cloud based applications; it pertains to and provides value to any development and operations environment.


4. Use cases The following use cases demonstrate some of the most often heard and used justifications on why DevOps and the marriage of ITSM solutions are needed and provide value to an organization.

4.1 Business Needs Require Faster Time-to-Market for Software

Issue: Customers are demanding new features, enhanced UIs and capabilities that range from desktop, mobile and B2B and the traditional waterfall development method cannot keep pace. The business is in danger of losing customers to vendors that continuously innovate.

Solution: Along with a transition to DevOps for the software lifecycle, a business also requires the infrastructure management capabilities that can support it. ITSM capabilities such as monitoring, asset management, license management, application performance management etc., in the IBM portfolio can assist by providing these DevOps supporting capabilities.

4.2 The Capabilities of DevOps are Required, Costs Must be Controlled

Issue: DevOps requires a change to the traditional development process. Understanding performance bottlenecks in a product, understanding the impact to the business infrastructure and also utilizing your infrastructure effectively (from what is deployed to what is available), is necessary to prevent continuous duplication or overbuying of capacity.

Solution: The ITSM components of IBM Middleware provide the core capabilities to assist with this. Capabilities to assist with this scenario include inventory, license management, performance and capacity management. Furthermore, automation will allow for the rapid spin up and spin down of infrastructure to handle transient loads.

4.3 Application Change and Configuration Management

Issue: A new or changed application may/will require changes to the configuration of the infrastructure it resides upon. These can range from network components (e.g. load balancers) to platform changes (e.g. JVM or OS changes).

Solution: The ITSM components of IBM Middleware can automate the deployment and configuration changes when necessary for any application. The application (whether new or changed), can carry with it any infrastructure requirements that the ITSM components must make before deploying or overwriting an existing application.

In addition, back-out strategies and automations can be put into the ITSM solution to allow for reversion to previous versions if an unanticipated error condition occurs.

4.4 Application Performance Monitoring

Issue: In both testing and operations, understanding the performance of an application is extremely important. It is necessary to understand the impact of any required code changes and also to measure the ability of the application to meet any SLAs and KPIs.

Solution: The ITSM components of IBM Middleware provide OS, Component and Application Performance Management and monitoring that enables the development, testing and operational teams to understand whether an application is meeting its performance goals.


4.5 Business Service Management

Issue: Understanding the components, relationships, interactions, KPIs and operational issues of a Business Service can be difficult to discover, maintain and present to the key stakeholders.

Solution: The ITSM components of IBM Middleware allow for the automated or manual discovery of these relationships and can track and report on events, performance and KPI attainment for development, operational and business owners.

4.6 Application Infrastructure Capacity Management

Issue: Need for development and operations to have up-to-date information on the applications performance and resource usage for problem determination and development planning.

Solution: The ITSM components of IBM Middleware allow for the ability to determine available capacity, utilization, trends and the particular drivers of usage. In addition, via the use of threshold events or analytics, the ITSM solution can model the application and determine anomalies based upon abnormal behavior of any particular metric.

4.7 Application Operation Automation

Issue: Need to automate the deployment, instrumentation and instantiation of the application into the topology, and operational monitoring tools. Need to integrate standard operational procedures, both manual and automated into the incident lifecycle.

Solution: The ITSM components of IBM Middleware can automate the entire provisioning process and integration into the operational tools and dashboards. They can also provide integrations into the incident lifecycle, both via tickets or events.


5. ITSM for DevOps Reference Architecture This chapter describes the reference architecture of ITSM for DevOps. The picture below depicts this architecture based on DevOps capabilities and supporting ITSM functionality. Subsequently we map the ITSM functionality with related DevOps capabilities. The aim is not to have complete mapping but to provide guidance where ITSM functionality can fit into DevOps capabilities.

The ITSM functionality in detail (numbers refer to the graphics above):

1) Domain specific dashboards provide the information that enables, enhances or supports DevOps capabilities. A comprehensive set of dashboards are needed from the ITSM tools, DASH provides these out-of-the-box. If additional customized dashboards are necessary, DASH can be used to incorporate information from other dashboards or sources, e.g. Management dashboard for delivery pipeline status.

2) IBM BigFix provides the functionality to deploy new upgrades or configuration changes to the applications. This capability can be used to support the lifecycle of an application e.g. patching. These capabilities must be analyzed in the overall continuous delivery process. It might be an option to deploy a new release instead of patching an existing one.

3) New monitoring or updates to existing monitoring are deployed to the solution to ensure that the application is properly instrumented. These capabilities must be synchronized with the release management process to understand the necessary type and metric for the instrumentation.

4) Change control process and tooling ensures that application deployments are scheduled and performed with all associated processes. The challenge here is to align ITIL based operational


processes with agile development processes which lead to “Continuous Operations”. IBM Control Desk is a vehicle to bring these worlds together from a process point of view.

5) Events and performance data are captured, processed, correlated and evaluated with analytics to assist with problem determination and continuous improvement

6) Dashboards and/or operator panels are provided to the appropriate domains

7) Inventory, topology and dependency information is captured or updated as new or existing applications are deployed or upgraded. Information can be aggregated in a dashboard to have an overall view and status about the underlying deployment infrastructure in test and production.

8) Repetitive operations tasks can be automated and controlled with IBM Workload Automation. Operations staff can check or resolve issues by leveraging Runbooks. The execution of these runbooks can be manual, semi-automatic, or automatic. Automation leverages existing technology to reach out to target systems.

5.1 DevOps capabilities and how ITSM can support them

The following section provides an explicit mapping of the aforementioned DevOps capabilities and how IBM IT Service Management solutions can support those capabilities.

Continuous Business Planning: Continuously plan, measure and bring business strategy and customer feedback into the development lifecycle.

ITSM support:

1) Incident/problems/changes from IBM Control Desk can be reported into business planning as feedback

2) Configuration Management within IBM Control Desk will help to identify back-out strategies, frozen zones or blackout periods for components and business services

Collaborative Development: Enable collaboration between business, development, and QA to deliver innovative, quality software continuously.

ITSM support:

1) Incorporate monitoring capabilities such as metrics and values into the application development process, e.g. logfiles, exceptions, etc.

2) Developers can easily create operational procedures for speed and consistency using tools like IBM Workload Automation or IBM Runbook Automation.

Continuous Testing: Reduce the cost of testing while helping development teams balance quality and speed.

ITSM support:

1) Establish test status dashboards per environment 2) Use BigFix for desired state of test environment 3) Use IBM Control Desk for planning and management of the test environment equipment

Continuous Release and Deployment: Deliver software to customers and internal users faster and more frequently with better quality, lower cost, and reduced risk.

ITSM support:


1) IBM Tivoli Monitoring agents (monitoring) and/or BigFix agents (inventory, desired state) as part of deployed image per test stage

2) Monitoring with IBM Application Performance Management and IBM Netcool Operations Insight (NOI), of staged deployment infrastructure

3) IBM Workload Automation can automate the underlying test infrastructure while UrbanCode automates the application deployment

Continuous Monitoring: Understand and accommodate the user perspective to achieve service levels with better visibility and continuous feedback across the entire software lifecycle.

ITSM support:

1) Monitoring of entire development chain and stages from business planning to release and deployment infrastructure

2) Service Level Agreements, Operational Level Agreements and Underpinning Contracts documented or referenced within IBM Control Desk can also be used to monitor and report on Incident and Problem Resolution time

Continuous Customer Feedback and Optimization: Provide the visual evidence and full context for analyzing customer behavior and pinpointing pain points.

ITSM support:

1) IBM Control Desk can pinpoint pain points based on incidents and problems and initiate changes for the entire DevOps lifecycle

2) IBM Control Desk can measure license usage in combination with IBM BigFix inventory for test stages and production


6. Implementation Options Whether you’re starting a new, or migrating an existing environment to utilize the DevOps methodology and associated ITSM tools, there are a number of patterns included below that have led to successful deployments.

6.1 What or how should you start with ITSM for DevOps?

IT Service Management for DevOps has multiple entry points. One could start by enabling application performance management to provide continuous application and infrastructure feedback. Others could start by providing event analytics or workload automation. But how these practices will incrementally improve and enable DevOps within an organization is key to determine where and how to start.

DevOps aims at improving time to value; it requires ability to provide continuous feedback and relies on different levels of automation. Not all DevOps practices are implemented at once and each practice will also be on its own continuous improvement cycle.

As such, our ITSM deployment approach relies on identifying bottlenecks and tasks that are causing delays or that require manual processing, thus impacting the DevOps team’s ability to continuously deliver business value. Our proposed approach is not prescriptive but rather aims at providing guidance in order to prioritize your ITSM deployment in support of your DevOps initiative.

Prioritizing ITSM deployment relies on assessing inhibitors to DevOps practices. In fact each DevOps practice can be impacted by a lack of appropriate ITSM capabilities.

Continuous Business Planning can be impacted by lack of change control and configuration management practices. Without them it becomes difficult for the DevOps teams to properly assess the impact of a change in delivery plan.

Collaborative Development can be impacted by lack of monitoring. Monitoring provides the DevOps team with infrastructure and application quality metrics required to meet operational quality objectives.

Continuous Testing can be impacted by lack of continuous monitoring at the infrastructure, application and business levels. Without the proper monitoring practices and Dashboard, DevOps teams cannot assess the operational quality of the applications in a timely fashion

Continuous Release and Deployment can be impacted by lack of automation and configuration management. Although DevOps tooling allows for application releases to be deployed continuously, the complete operational environment needs to be automated to support the application delivery cycles. Operation scripts, patches and configuration changes all need to be automated to deliver on the DevOps promises.

Continuous Monitoring can be impacted by lack of proper monitoring and supporting operational dashboards. These ITSM capabilities are key in supporting most of the DevOps capabilities and are often present at different levels within an organization. Deploying and improving monitoring, especially the ability to provide a unified operational view of an application and business is one of the foundations of ITSM for DevOps.

Continuous Customer Feedback and Optimization can also be impacted by lack of monitoring, but mostly by lack of a business level dashboard and related KPIs enabling the business to understand the impact of planned or delivered changes. Optimization also relies on operational monitoring including capacity and performance management.



7. Summary DevOps, when properly implemented, can have a tremendous payback in improving the entire delivery of business services, providing improved speed, customer satisfaction and the integration of operational capabilities as a core component versus a bolt-on when placed in production.

While this paper focused on the IBM Middleware ITSM solutions that support and assist with the implementation, use or migration to a DevOps based environment, IBM has a complete portfolio of Development tools that integrate with the ITSM portfolio to give you a turnkey solution from beginning to end.

Furthermore, beyond the products/solutions, IBM has the skills and services organizations that can help you with developing your vision, plan and roadmap to achieve the capabilities and benefits of a DevOps environment.

For additional questions or to speak to an IBM Specialist, please contact your IBM Sales Representative to discuss your needs


8. References • Adopting the IBM DevOps approach for continuous software delivery – http://ibm.biz/adoptingdevops

• DevOps — the IBM approach (white paper) - http://ibm.biz/BdEnBz

• The Software Edge (study) - http://ibm.co/156KdoO

• Adopting the IBM DevOps Approach (article) – http://ibm.biz/adoptingdevops

• DevOps Services for Bluemix (service) – http://bluemix.net

• DevOps for Dummies - http://www.ibm.com/ibm/devops/us/en/resources/dummiesbooks/

• Scaled Agile Framework - http://www.scaledagileframework.com/

This is one of a series of IBM whitepapers describing how the IBM portfolio provides IT Service Management capabilities that can assist your business in achieving its needs and goals. For the full list of whitepapers, please visit the following location for additional reading:

ITSM Reference Architectures Contact Location

IT Service Management Alan Keel http://tinyurl.com/zda8v5x

Hybrid Management Kevin Green http://tinyurl.com/zbmzc6u

IBM Middleware Rod Bowman, Julianne Bielski https://ibm.biz/BdH9HL

Communications & Service Provider Dominic Heade https://ibm.biz/BdH9HL

Analytics in Service Management William Headlee https://ibm.biz/BdH9HL

For other capability based best practices of offerings in the Hybrid Management Reference Architecture please visit www.ibm.com

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IT Service Management Reference Architecture Series … · IT Service Management Reference Architecture Series ... (ITIL), Business Process Framework (eTOM) ... Capabilities to assist