PurePerformance

Why do some organizations still see performance testing as a waste of time? Why are we not demanding the same level of performance criteria for SaaS-based solutions as we do for in-house hosted services? Why are many organizations just validating performance to be “within specification” vs “holistically optimized”?In this episode we have invited James Pulley (@perfpulley), Performance Veteran and PerfBytes News of the Damned host, to discuss who organizations can level up from performance testing to true performance engineering. He also shares his approaches to analyzing performance issues and gives everyone advice on what to do to start a performance practice in your organization.https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslpulley3/https://www.perfbytes.com/p/news-of-damned.html

Imagine a future where we deploy every code change directly into production because feature flags eliminated the need for staging. Feature flags allow us to deploy any code change, but only launch the feature to a specific set of users that we want to expose to new capabilities. Monitoring the usage and the impact enables continuous experimentation: optimizing what is not perfect yet and throw away features (technical debt) that nobody really cares about. So – what are feature flags?We got to chat with Heidi Waterhouse (@wiredferret), Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly (https://launchdarkly.com/), who gives as a great introduction on Feature Flags, how organizations actually define a feature and why it is paramount to differentiate between Deploy and Launch. We learn how to test feature flags, what options we have to enable features for a certain group of users and how important it is to always include monitoring. IF you want to learn more about feature flags check out http://featureflags.io/. If you want to learn more about Heidi’s passion check out https://heidiwaterhouse.com/.

Adrian Hornsby (@adhorn) has dedicated his last years helping enterprises around the world to build resilient systems. He wrote a great blog series titled “Patterns for Resilient Architectures” and has given numerous talks about this such as Resiliency and Availability Design Patterns for the Cloud at DevOne in Linz earlier this year.Listen in and learn more about why resiliency starts with humans, why we need to version everything we do, why default timeouts have to be flagged, how to deal with retries and backoffs and why every distributed architect has to start designing systems that provide different service levels depending on the overall system health state.Links:Adrian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adhornMedium Blog Post: https://medium.com/@adhorn/patterns-for-resilient-architecture-part-1-d3b60cd8d2b6Adrian's DevOne talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLg13UmEXlwDevOne Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXTyTc3SPU

Whether you are still researching on whether you need a Service Mesh or simple use a load balancer or if you are already deploying multi hybrid-cloud architectures and Service Meshes help you secure the location aware routed traffic. In both cases: listen to this episode!We invited Sebastian Weigand (@ThatDevopsGuy) back to our podcast who wrote papers such as Building a Planet-Scale Architecture the Easy Way. In our episode Sebastian walks us through why Service Meshes have gained so much in popularity, what the main use cases are, how you should decide on whether or not use Service Meshes and which challenges you might run into as you expand into using more features.https://twitter.com/thatdevopsguyhttps://files.devnetwork.cloud/DeveloperWeekNewYork/presentations/2019/scalability/Sebastian_Weigand.pdf

Steve McGhee (@stevemcghee) is an expert in post mortems and SRE. He has learned the craft at Google, applied it at MindBody and is now sharing his experiences while back at Google to the larger SRE community. Listen to this episode and learn more about how post mortem analysis can be the starting point of your SRE transformation. How it can help reliability engineering to build and engineer systems that fail gracefully instead of causing full crashes or outages.Steve also went into monitor what matters and only defining alerts on leading indicators with an expiration date – a fascinating concept to avoid a flood of custom alerting in production!If you want to learn more from Steve or SRE check out these additional resources he mentioned in the podcast: The SRE I aspire to be (SRECon19) and his 2 blog part series on blameless.com.https://twitter.com/stevemcgheehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7kD_JfRUY0https://www.blameless.com/blog/improve-postmortem-with-sre-steve-mcghee

Keep hearing the terms SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, Error Budgets and finally want to understand what they are, who should be responsible for and how they fit into SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)?Then listen to our conversation with Sebastian Weigand who has been helping organizations modernizing not only their application stacks but also helping them embrace DevOps & SRE. Learn about who is responsible to define SLIs, what the difference between SLOs and SLAs are and what the difference between DevOps & SRE is in his opinion!Sebastian, who calls himself “That Devops Guy” (@ThatDevopsGuy), also suggests to check out the latest free report on SLO Adoption and Usage of SRE as well as SRE Books from Google to get started with that practice.https://www.linkedin.com/in/thatdevopsguy/https://twitter.com/ThatDevopsGuyhttps://landing.google.com/sre/resources/practicesandprocesses/slo-adoption-and-usage-in-sre/https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

Cassidy (@cassidoo) has been building but also educating developers on how to build apps on React, JavaScript, JAMStack and many other technologies over the past years. We got her on our podcast where she gave us insights into React Hooks, how WPO (Web Performance Optimization) plays out in the React world, why it is important to think about state from the start and that its important to always have your end user in mind before even writing your first line of JavaScript.In the podcast she references additional resources which here are the links for: The performance benefits of Variable Fonts, Mandy Michael (@Mandy_Kerr), Isabela Moreira (@isabelacmor) and A/B Testing with React (YouTube).https://twitter.com/cassidoohttps://reactjs.org/https://jamstack.org/https://uxdesign.cc/the-performance-benefits-of-variable-fonts-79af8c4ff56chttps://twitter.com/Mandy_Kerrhttps://twitter.com/isabelacmorhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpfR0rRfcNk

How do you prepare for a 2Mio concurrent user load that lasts for 7 seconds? What does the load infrastructure look like? How do you optimize your scripts? How do you deal with DNS or CDNs?In this episode we hear from Joerek van Gaalen who has done these types of tests. He shares his experiences and approaches to running these “special event extreme load tests”. If you want to learn more make sure to check out his presentation and read his blog post from Neotys PAC 2020.https://www.linkedin.com/in/joerekvangaalen/https://www.neotys.com/performance-advisory-council/joerek_van_gaalen

Have you ever burned 30k because you forgot to turn off your test VMs over the weekend? Have you ever accidentally deleted “the production table” because you thought you were connected to your dev database? We often only hear the good stories and not those that teach us about what we should not do in order to avoid disaster!Join this episode where Justin Donohoo, Founder and CTO of Observian, tells us horror stories from his professional life that taught him great lessons on what not to do when moving to the cloud, re-architecture because of exponential growth or let the intern do things he/she shouldn’t do.https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdonohoo/

Goranka Bjedov has seen the different sides of Open Source while she was working for organizations such as Google, Facebook or AT&T Labs. Before she takes the stage at www.devone.at later this year she gives us her take on Scott McNealy’s quote “Open Source is free like a puppy is free”. Tune in and hear her thoughts on how to pick the right tools, languages or frameworks, how to grow a an open source project and what things you should definitely avoid.https://www.linkedin.com/in/goranka-bjedov-5969a6/https://devone.at/