Support services

Explanation and Overview

Introduction

The previous modules mainly dealt with the technical aspects of orchestration and monitoring.

But in an organisation, you are not the only one who is responsible for everything and you have to work with your colleagues. This of course also has to do with how the organization is organized and who the users of the services are.

In the previous decade, the organizations were more divided into separate parts such as business, development, security, and operations. When something did not work, the other was often referred to. In new organizational forms, the parts are more jointly responsible for the functioning of services.

Examples for this include IT Service Management, DevOps, DevSecOps, etc.

IT Service Management

IT service management (ITSM) refers to the entirety of activities – directed by policies, organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures
 – that are performed by an organization to design, plan, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.

A Service Desk is a primary IT function within the discipline of IT service management (ITSM) as defined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It is intended to provide a Single Point of Contact ("SPOC") to meet the communication needs of both users and IT staff, and also to satisfy both Customer and IT Provider objectives. "User" refers to the actual user of the service, while "Customer" refers to the entity that is paying for service.

DevOps

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops) which aims to shorten the systems development
life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.[wikipedia]

As DevOps is intended to be a cross-functional mode of working, those who practice the methodology use different sets of tools—referred to as "toolchains"—rather than a single one. These toolchains are expected to fit into one or more of the following categories, reflective of key aspects of the development and delivery process:

Coding – code development and review, source code management tools, code merging
Building – continuous integration tools, build status
Testing – continuous testing tools that provide quick and timely feedback on business risks
Packaging – artefact repository, application pre-deployment staging
Releasing – change management, release approvals, release automation
Configuring – infrastructure configuration and management, infrastructure as code tools
Monitoring – applications performance monitoring, end-user experience

Some categories are more essential in a DevOps toolchain than others; especially continuous integration (e.g. Jenkins, Gitlab, Bitbucket pipelines) and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Puppet)

The goals of DevOps span the entire delivery pipeline. They include:

Improved deployment frequency;
Faster time to market;
The lower failure rate of new releases;
Shortened lead time between fixes;
Faster mean time to recovery (in the event of a new release crashing or otherwise disabling the current system).

DevSecOps

DevSecOps is the integration of security into emerging agile IT and DevOps development as seamlessly and as transparently as possible. Ideally, this is done 
without reducing the agility or speed of developers or requiring them to leave their development toolchain environment [Gartner].

DevOps isn’t just about development and operations teams. If you want to take full advantage of the agility and responsiveness of a DevOps approach, IT security must also play an integrated role in the full life cycle of your apps.

Why? In the past, the role of security was isolated to a specific team in the final stage of development. That wasn’t as problematic when development cycles lasted months or even years, but those days are over. Effective DevOps ensures rapid and frequent development cycles (sometimes weeks or days), but outdated security practices can undo even the most efficient DevOps initiatives.

Service Catalog

A service catalog (or catalogue), is an organized and curated collection of any and all business and information technology related services that can be 
performed by, for, or within an enterprise.

Service catalogues act as knowledge management tools for the employees and consultants of an enterprise, allowing them to route their requests for and about services and services related topics to the subject matter experts who own, are accountable for, and operate them. Each service within such service catalogues is usually very repeatable and has controlled inputs, processes, and outputs.

Service catalogues also allow leadership and management, for example, the Chief Operations Officer (COO), to compartmentalize the enterprise into highly structured and more efficient operational units, hence the descriptive phrase: "a service-oriented enterprise."

A service catalogue is a means of centralizing all services that are important to the stakeholders of the enterprises which implement and use it. Given its digital and virtual implementation, via software, the service catalogue acts, at a minimum, as a digital registry and a means for highly distributed enterprises to see, find, invoke, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the world. This means that people in one part of the world can find and utilize the same services that people in other parts of the world use, eliminating the need to develop and support local services via a federated implementation model.

Centralizing services also act as a means of identifying service gaps and redundancies that can then be addressed by the enterprise to improve itself.

Service catalogues are implemented in a manner that facilitates the registration, discovery, request, execution, and tracking of desired services for catalogue users. Each service within the catalogue typically includes traits and elements such as:

Clear ownership of and accountability for the service (a person and often an organization)
A name or identification label for the service
A description of the service
A service categorization or type that allows it to be grouped with other similar services
Related service request types
Any supporting or underpinning services
Service level agreement (SLA) data and information that helps service providers set expectations for their service requestors
Who is entitled to request/view the service
Associated costs (if any)
How to request the service and how its delivery is fulfilled
Escalation points and key contacts.

Capacity Management

Capacity management's primary goal is to ensure that information technology resources are right-sized to meet current and  future business requirements 
in a cost-effective manner. One common interpretation of capacity management is described in the ITIL framework. ITIL version 3 views capacity management 
as comprising three sub-processes: business capacity management, service capacity management, and component capacity management.

As the usage of IT services change and functionality evolves, the amount of central processing units (CPUs), memory and storage to a physical or virtual server etc. also changes. If it is possible to understand the demands being made currently, and how they will change over time, this approach proposes that capacity planning for IT service growth becomes easier and less reactive. If there are spikes in, for example, processing power at a particular time of the day, it proposes analyzing what is happening at that time and make changes to maximize the existing IT infrastructure, tune the application, or move a batch cycle to a quieter period. This foresight from proactive capacity planning identifies any potential capacity related issues likely to arise and justifies any necessary investment decisions to the business and IT stakeholders i.e. the precise server requirements to accommodate future growth in IT resource demand, a technology refresh or a data centre consolidation.

These activities are intended to optimize performance and efficiency and to plan for and justify financial investments. Capacity management is concerned with:

Monitoring the performance and throughput or load on a server, server farm, or property
Performance analysis of measurement data, including analysis of the impact of new releases on capacity
Performance tuning of activities to ensure the most efficient use of existing infrastructure
Understanding the demands on the service and plans for workload growth (or shrinkage)
Influences on demand for computing resources
Capacity planning of storage, computer hardware, software and connection infrastructure resources required over some future period.

Capacity management interacts with the discipline of Performance Engineering, both during the requirements and design activities of building a system, and when using performance monitoring as an input for managing capacity of deployed systems.

Total Cost of Ownership Management

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or system.
 It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting or even ecological economics where it includes social costs.

TCO, when incorporated in any financial benefit analysis, provides a cost basis for determining the total economic value of an investment. Examples include return on investment, internal rate of return, economic value-added, return on information technology, and rapid economic justification.

A TCO analysis includes the total cost of acquisition and operating costs, as well as costs related to replacement or upgrades at the end of the life cycle. A TCO analysis is used to gauge the viability of any capital investment. An enterprise may use it as a product/process comparison tool. It is also used by credit markets and financing agencies. TCO directly relates to an enterprise's asset and/or related systems total costs across all projects and processes, thus giving a picture of the profitability over time.

TCO is applied to the analysis of information technology products, seeking to quantify the financial impact of deploying a product over its life cycle. These technologies include software and hardware, and training.

Technology deployment can include the following as part of TCO:

Computer hardware and programs
- Network hardware and software
- Server hardware and software
- Workstation hardware and software
- Installation and integration of hardware and software
- Purchasing research
- Warranties and licenses
- License tracking/compliance
- Migration expenses
- Risks: susceptibility to vulnerabilities, availability of upgrades, patches and future licensing policies, etc.
Operation expenses
- Infrastructure (floor space)
- Electricity (for related equipment, cooling, backup power)
- Testing costs
- Downtime, outage and failure expenses
- Diminished performance (i.e. users having to wait, diminished money-making ability)
- Security (including breaches, loss of reputation, recovery and prevention)
- Backup and recovery process
- Technology/user training
- Audit (internal and external)
- Insurance
- Information technology personnel
- Corporate management time
Long term expenses
- Replacement
- Future upgrade or scalability expenses
- Decommissioning

Challenges

The challenges can be found here.

Resources

Organisation Basics		Organising Work-In-Progress (ticket systems, kanban) OS installation and configuration Software deployment (Software Delivery Life Cycle)
Infrastructure Principles		Small batches principle Pets and Cattle Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
DevOps		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps edX MOOCs: https://www.edx.org/course/devops-foundations-and-tools https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-devops-transforming-and-improving
DevSecOps		Introduction: https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/devops/what-is-devsecops
IT service management		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_service_management
Service Catalog		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_catalog
Service Catalog		https://www.cherwell.com/library/essential-guides/essential-guide-to-creating-an-it-service-catalog/
ITIL 4		ITIL Foundation ITIL 4 Edition_2