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DevOps, NoOps, AIOps: Who’s In Charge, Anyway?

ServiceNow

 The changing role of IT in digital transformation.

The IT profession—like technology itself—is evolving at a breathtaking pace. Modern IT pros juggle multiple digital transformation projects while navigating the complexities of AI, cloud strategy, observability and much more.

Technology is becoming more autonomous and self-healing. So who’s in charge of digital transformation, anyway? Let’s take a look at the players to find out.

Old-school IT

Back in the day, an IT Ops engineer would monitor performance and availability issues using dashboards from dozens of different tools. The daily pattern was always reactive: Just as they were finishing up fixing their last issue, an onslaught of events would make their way to them across a bunch of unrelated dashboards. 

Each issue could take hours or days to resolve. Day after day it was a rinse and repeat model across Ops and service desk teams. There were no early warning indications that things were starting to go wrong—no way to catch an issue before it impacted users or the business.

This is obviously not a sustainable model. Thankfully, it is rapidly disappearing. In fact, ServiceNow research has found that the traditional NOC (network operating center) is shrinking and, in some cases, disappearing. With more automation and better observability, IT pros no longer need to monitor alerts 24/7.

Enter DevOps

If DevOps was a piece of jazz music, it would have been a riff off a book called The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, which transformed the manufacturing industry in the 1990s. Goldrat’s methodology came down to identifying bottlenecks in the overall supply chain. Once the bottleneck was identified and removed, everything could move much faster.

DevOps applies a similar methodology to software, injecting speed into the software development process by removing bottlenecks and breaking down the wall between the Dev team (the coders) and the Ops team (the fixers). That’s where the DevOps methodology comes in.

In DevOps, if you're the coder you also own fixing the code when it breaks—as the saying goes “you build it, you run it.” No more tossing it over to the Ops team to worry about fixing problems once the code is in production.

As DevOps took off, cloud migrations accelerated, open-source tools proliferated, and microservices took hold. The explosion of new tools, applications, and systems to support DevOps led to additional complexity and, frankly, the inability to streamline the process in the way that was originally intended. 

The NoOps vision

The sprawl and complexity of DevOps has not gone unnoticed. 

In 2018, Tomer Simon, chief scientist for Microsoft Israel, published an article titled Stop DevOps Before Someone Gets Hurt. In it, he suggests that we skip DevOps and leap directly into NoOps.

NoOps ? Really? Not entirely. Simon writes that someone will always be doing  the ops—it is a matter of who, where, and how many. In reality, most IT teams aren’t ready to embrace NoOps because they are still working on getting the DevOps methodology in place. 

DevOps did remove some development constraints. With the rise of infrastructure as code (IaC), Dev no longer had to wait on provisioning physical servers, test environments, or cloud resources to spin up code, test it, and drop it into production. But the complexity for the Ops team was not mitigated and new challenges arose in oversight of configuration changes. This is why Simon’s warning still resonates far and wide.

Predictive AIOps shifts the focus to transformation 

When pending issues can be caught and presented to the Ops team before anything ever breaks, IT becomes proactive and the cycle of reactive burnout is broken. 

The next step is predictive AIOps, tech that catches issues in real time without being told what to look for in advance. Manual processes can be automated and the disparate data laying around in systems across the globe can be pulled into a single data model to aid with problem determination and predictive analytics. 

With predictive AIOps to keep digital products and services running 24/7, the IT Ops team can focus on steering across-the-board digital transformation. We’re seeing this already. ServiceNow’s research team has identified three focus areas for IT Ops going forward:

  1. Governance and visibility, including data visualization on business impact
  2. Providing alert response capability for components for which automation is not yet available
  3. Closing the loop on incident response, making sure issues are fixed with agreed-upon service level agreements

IT Ops, DevOps, NoOps...whatever tack you take on IT operations, predictive AIOps is the key to the future. Unshackled from the day-to-day drudgery of reactive IT, teams can finally tackle digital transformation across the company.