ITIL vs SRE
By: Anderson Marques
Tags: Software Development, Coding, Software Engineering, Programming, Software

Photo by Dietmar Becker on Unsplash

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” — Ecclesiastes 1:9

Over the past few years, we have seen the birth of countless startups. The products and services of these small startups have managed to gain the trust and preference of most consumers. Startups innovate and adapt very quickly. In the meantime, huge organizations with thousands of employees and decades of history are extremely complex systems that proportionately require huge management efforts. We can say that startups are comparable to speedboats while large organizations are more like transatlantic ships. While the startups were focusing on being lean, agile, and adapt to the customers, large organizations were still focusing on processes, controls, and strong management.

ITIL describes itself as a set of best practices for managing IT services. SRE as a way to reach customer happiness. While SRE is more popular between startups, ITIL is widely adopted by large organizations. In recent years ITIL has been criticized for being bureaucratic, inflexible, and not getting along well with new ways of working like Agile and DevOps. Wouldn’t the best practices for managing IT services be that good?

ITIL was developed by the UK government in the 1980s to improve the quality of IT services and projects. Its goal is “to provide services that meet the needs of its customers”. ITIL understands that the service value chain depends not only on IT but also on people, partners, and processes. ITIL proposes some best practices for managing IT services throughout their entire life cycle. The world has changed a lot since the 1980s. However, the importance of providing services that meet consumer needs remains the same.

Like SRE, ITIL is based on a set of principles and practices. Principles are the basic idea or rule that controls how something happens or works. The ITIL principles are:

Focus on value Start where you are Progress iteratively with feedback Collaborate and promote visibility Think and work holistically Keep it simple and practice Optimize and Automate

When comparing ITIL principles with SRE principles, we clearly see that they have a lot in common:

In addition, ITIL also describes a set of 34 service management practices. Practices are what translate the ideas behind the principles into action. Given the similarity between the ITIL and SRE principles, it would also be expected that their practices also be similar. Here are some ITIL practices aligned with the SRE principles:

Availability Management

Capacity and Performance Management

Incident Management

IT Asset Management

Problem Management

Release Management

Service Request Management

Service Validation and Testing Management

Deployment Management

ITIL describes practices but does not prescribe how they should be implemented. Likewise, SRE practices can and should be adapted to the company’s reality. SRE intersects and changes some ITIL practices, but it does not want to replace it. Modern solutions are actually a compound of internal and external services in an extensive value chain. ITIL is right in trying to put some order in the chaos. But ITIL should be used more as a framework and not as a recipe. Curiously, when implementing SRE practices, we are unintentionally implementing part of ITIL.

Large organizations have often implemented ITIL the wrong way. The term “management” is generally seen as a hierarchy in the organizational structure and not as an action verb related to the activity of manage something. The bureaucracy, excess of controls, and complexity of processes reflect this. ITIL fails when the implementation of its practices violates its own principles. Although SRE has brought new air in the way of implementing some of the practices described by ITIL, SRE is also at risk of being corrupted in the long run. Hence the importance of stressing principles before practices and always adapting practices to the company’s reality.

In short:

SRE and ITIL have similar principles

ITIL practices are not prescriptive

ITIL scope is ampler than SRE

Some ITIL practices are fully compatible with the SRE principles

SRE should not be seen as a substitute for ITIL

When implementing SRE, we are unconsciously implementing some ITIL practices

In the long run, SRE runs the same risks as ITIL if it doesn’t stick to the principles

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