PurePerformance

Woo hoo!! We're kicking off the Dynatrace conference in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan Hotel!

Eric Wright (@discoposse) is a “veteran” and expert when it comes to virtualization and cloud technologies. He introduces us into the field of container and container orchestrations, the vendors in the space, the pros and cons and the key capabilities he things have to be considered when evaluating the next generation virtualization platform for your enterprise.If you want to learn more check out his podcast - http://gcondemand.podbean.com/ - as well as his publications on https://turbonomic.com/author/eric-wright/

How often have you deployed an application that was supposed to be load tested well but then crashed in production? One of the reasons might be that you never took the time to really analyze real life load patterns and distributions. Brian Chandler (@Channer531) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-chandler-8366663b ) – Performance Engineer at Raymond James – has worked with their Operations Team to not only start loving application specific performance data captured in production. They starting breaking down the DevOps Walls from Right to Left by sharing this data with Testers to create more realistic load tests but also started education developers to learn from real life production issues.We hope you enjoy this one as we learn a lot of cool techniques, metrics and dashboards that Brian uses at Raymond James. If you want to see it live check out our webinar where he presented their approach as well: https://info.dynatrace.com/apm_wc_getting_started_with_devops_na_registration.htmlYou can view the screenshots we refer to at:https://assets.dynatrace.com/en/images/general/Chandler_01.jpghttps://assets.dynatrace.com/en/images/general/Chandler_02.jpg

HAPPY NEW YEARDaniel Freij (@DanielFreij) – Senior Performance Engineer and Community Manager at Apica – has been doing hundreds of load tests in his career. 5-10 years ago performance engineers used the “well known” load testing tools such as Load Runner. But things have changed as we have seen both a Shift-Left and a Shift-Right of performance engineering away from the classical performance and load testing teams. Tools became easier, automatable and cloud ready. In this session we discuss these changes that happened in the recent years, what it means for today’s engineering teams and also what might happen in 5-10 years from now. We also want to do a shout out to a performance clinic Daniel and Andi are doing on January 25th 2017 where they walk you through a modern cloud based pipeline using AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, Apica and Dynatrace. Registration link can be found here: http://bit.ly/onlineperfclinicRelated Link:ZebraTester Community: https://community.zebratester.com/

Mark Tomlinson, still a veteran and performance god, is enlightening us on his concept of Continuous Acceleration of Performance. Continuous Delivery is all about getting faster feedback from code changes as code gets deployed faster in smaller increments to the end user. One aspect that is often left out is feedback on performance metrics and behavior. In the “old days” performance feedback was given very late – either in the load testing phase at the end of the project lifecycle or even as late as when it hits production. That could be too late and it makes it hard to fix the root cause.Listen to our conversation on how to accelerate performance related feedback loops without getting overwhelmed with too much data!

Mark Tomlinson, “a veteran” in Performance Engineering, discusses how DevOps is a big opportunity for performance engineering – but also a threat for many that have been in the business for a long time. The big question is: are “traditional performance engineers” using their Load Runners or SilkPerformers at the end of the project lifecycle ready to change? Ready to learn new tools? Ready to think about automating performance engineering into the delivery pipeline and doing that in collaboration with the rest of the engineering team? Ready to “Check your Ego at the door”?Listen to our conversation where we also discuss how these roles have changed in organizations we recently interacted with.

In Part II with Finn Lorbeer (@finnlorbeer) from Thoughtworks we discuss some of the new approaches when implementing new software features. How can we build the right thing the right way for our end users?Feature development should start with UX wireframes to get feedback from end users before writing a single line of code. Feature teams then need to define and implement feedback loops to understand how features operate and are used in production. We also discuss the power of A/B testing and canary releases as it allows teams to “experiment” on new ideas and thanks to close feedback loops will quickly learn on how end users are accepting it. *****Related Links:******Process Automation and Continuous Delivery at OTTO.dehttps://dev.otto.de/2015/11/24/process-automation-and-continuous-delivery-at-otto-de/Are we only Test Manager?http://www.lor.beer/are-we-only-test-manager/Sind wir wirklich nur Testmanagerinnen?https://dev.otto.de/2016/06/08/sind-wir-wirklich-nur-testmanagerinnen/

Finn Lorbeer (@finnlorbeer) is a quality enthusiast working for Thoughtworks Germany. I met Finn earlier this year at the German Testing Days where he presented the transformation story at Otto.de. He helped transform one of their 14 “line of business” teams by changing the way QA was seen by the organization. Instead of a WALL between Dev and Ops the teams started to work as a real DevOps team. Further architectural and organizational changes ultimately allowed them to increase deployment speed from 2-3 per week to up to 200 per week for the best performing teams.*****Related Links:******Process Automation and Continuous Delivery at OTTO.dehttps://dev.otto.de/2015/11/24/process-automation-and-continuous-delivery-at-otto-de/Are we only Test Manager?http://www.lor.beer/are-we-only-test-manager/Sind wir wirklich nur Testmanagerinnen?https://dev.otto.de/2016/06/08/sind-wir-wirklich-nur-testmanagerinnen/Das Leben ist hasselhoffhttp://giphy.com/search/david-hasselhoff

Gene Kim has been promoting a lot of the great DevOps Transformation stories from Unicorns (Innovators) but more so from "The Horses" (Early Adopters). The next DOES (DevOps Enterprise Summit) is just on its way helping him with his mission to increase DevOps adoption across the IT world.In our 3 podcast sessions we discussed the success factors of DevOps adoption, the reasons that lead to resistance as well as how to best measure success and enforce feedback loops.Thanks Gene for allowing us to be part of transforming our IT world.Related Link:Get a free digital 160 page DevOps Handbook Excerpthttp://itrevolution.com/handbook-excerpt?utm_source=PurePerformance&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=handbookexcerpt&utm_content=podcast