Become ITIL® 4 Foundation Certified in 7 Days by Abhinav Krishna Kaiser
Why ITIL V4: version 4 of ITIL that is tailored for the digital age where boundary between the development stage and operations stage is not razor thin but rather has vanished into thin air.
It is the standard today to run IT operations. With the advent of the digital age and DevOps, the principles and the core understanding of management of services were somewhat shaken.
Anybody can take up the ITIL 4 certification. There are no criteria for minimum experience, education, or other prerequisite certifications.
There are 40 multiple choice questions; every question comes with a choice of four possible answers.
• Exam duration: 60 minutes
• Each question carries one mark; wrong answers do not bog you down with negative scoring.
• You are required to give 26 correct answers to pass the exam: 65 percent.
ITIL 4 was announced in 2017: Companies like ITIL, AXELOS, initiated a refresh by reaching out to about 2,000 professionals from various organizations to come together with the single objective of creating a framework that was agile and innovative. The outcome is ITIL 4.
In ITIL V4 , The Service Lifecycle Is Dead and no more used. In ITIL V4 this is now replaced with Service value system and service value chain are the new concepts that drive the delivery of services.
ITIL 4 has introduced the concept of practices. Problem management practice in this instance is a system on its whole whose objectives is to deliver all the problem management outputs.
In ITIL 4 definition of a service means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.
Today a service provider cannot tuck away services and deliver it to the customer in isolation. Any service can become valuable only if there is ample direction and feedback from the customer, the primary person who uses the service. Hence the definition has rightly included co-creation.
Governance :(Need to update)
Automation: Activities that do not require cognizance, intelligence, or decision-making brain cells can theoretically be run by machines. This makes even more sense if these activities are repeatable exercises.
ITIL 4 has taken Automation to the next level by defining a guiding principle coupling optimization and automation to allow ITIL to step through DevOps’ doors.
ITIL V4 certification path :
After completing ITIL Foundation which is base for recognizing these below two certifications
- ITIL Managing Professional (MP) – It is meant for pure service-management professionals who work in technology and digital streams.
- ITIL Strategic Leader (SL) – It is meant to look outward toward business like business needs, expectations, and everything related to them.
Brief Overview of DevOps
DevOps is a culture which brings together the development and operations teams. DevOps is not just a methodology for developers. Operations too gets its share of the benefits pie. In Devops we do not blame individuals. Individuals are not made responsible when we look at the overall DevOps scheme of things. This culture develops a system where the mistakes that are made get identified and rectified in the developmental stages, well before they reach production. Hence DevOps is a cultural transformation that brings together people from across disciplines to work under a single umbrella to collaborate and work as one unit with an open mind and to remove inefficiencies.
DevOps name itself has brief history if interested you can read from here
DevOps principles
CALMS stands for the following:
• Culture
• Automation
• Lean
• Measurement
• Sharing
Culture: There is urban legend saying ” “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If you want to make a massive mind-boggling earth-shaking change, start by changing the culture that can make it happen and adapt to the proposed new way of working. Culture is something that cannot be changed by a swift switching process. It is embedded into human behavior and requires an overhaul of people’s behavior.
DevOps as culture:
• Take responsibility for the entire product and not just the work that you perform.
• Step out of your comfort zone and innovate.
• Experiment as much as you want; there’s a safety net to catch you if you fall
• Communicate, collaborate, and develop affinity with the involved teams.
• For developers especially; you build it, you run it.
Automation: It is a key component in the DevOps methodology. The objective is to automate whatever possible in the software delivery life cycle. The kinds of activities that can be efficiently automated are those that are repetitive and those that don’t ask for human intelligence. Activities involving executing tasks such as running a build or running a test script can be automated. The art of writing the code or test
scripts require the use of human intelligence, and the machines of today are not in a position to do it. In future, artificial intelligence can be a threat to the activities that are dependent on humans today.
Lean: The thinking behind the Lean methodology is to keep things simple and not to overcomplicate them. There are two parts to the Lean principle.
- The primary one is not to bloat the logic or the way we do things; keep it straightforward and minimal.
- The second part of the principle is to reduce the wastage arising from the methodology. (Defects are one of the key wastes)
Measurement: If you seek to automate everything, then you probably need a system to provide feedback whenever something goes wrong. Feedback is possible if you know what the optimum results are and what aren’t. The only way you can find out whether the outcome is optimum or not is by measuring it.
Measurement principle provides direction on the measures to implement and keep tabs on the pulse of the overall software delivery. It is not a simple task to measure everything. Many times, we do not even know what we should measure. With automation in place, it is extremely important that all the critical activities, and the infrastructure that supports them, be monitored and optimized for measurement.
Sharing: The final principle is sharing, which hinges on the need for collaboration and knowledge sharing between people. If we aim to significantly hasten the process of software delivery, it is only possible if people don’t work in silos anymore. The knowledge, experience, thoughts, and ideas must be put out into the open for others to join in the process of making them better, enhanced, and profound. With information being transparent, there will be no reason for others to worry or be sceptical about the
dependencies or the outcome of the process
Elements of DevOps
DevOps is not a framework; it is a set of good practices. People, process, and technology are the three elements that are common to all DevOps practices. In fact, they are the enablers to effect change in the DevOps culture. Only when the three elements come together in unison are we able to realize the complete benefits of DevOps.
Today, people talk of DevOps through the lens of technology. They throw around several tool names and claim that they do DevOps. So, the question to ponder is whether you can really do DevOps by tools alone.? answer is no.
All the three elements of people, process, and technology are essential to build the DevOps methodology and to achieve the objectives that are set forth before us. By the union of all three elements, we can create an unmatched synergy that can fuel developments at an unparalleled pace.
Let’s go through on each of these elements.
People
Let’s say that an application is developed, and it comes to the change advisory board (CAB) for approval. One of the parties on the CAB is the operational teams. They specifically ask questions around the testing that has been performed for this software, and even though the answer from development is yes for the success rate of all the tests, the operational teams tend to be critical but unfortunately, they only have the confirmation of the developers to go with when the quality of the software is put on
the line.
Process
Processes are a key component in ensuring the success of any project. It is important that processes are defined first along with a functional DevOps architecture and then translated into tooling and automation. The process must always drive tools and never the other way around. Most IT projects are run on Agile project management methodologies because of the flexibility it offers in this ever-changing market.
When we talk about Agile project management, there are a number of methodologies to pick from. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Extreme Programming (XP), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Crystal, and Feature Driven Development (FDD) are some examples.
Technology
Technology is the third element of DevOps and is often regarded as the most important. It is true in a sense that without automation, we cannot possibly achieve the fast results that I have shared earlier through some statistics. The number of tools that claim to support DevOps activities is enormous—too many to count.
DevOps Practices
DevOps has become synonymous with certain practices such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.