

PurePerformance
PurePerformance
The brutal truth about digital performance engineering and operations.Andreas (aka Andi) Grabner and Brian Wilson are veterans of the digital performance world. Combined they have seen too many applications not scaling and performing up to expectations. With more rapid deployment models made possible through continuous delivery and a mentality shift sparked by DevOps they feel it’s time to share their stories. In each episode, they and their guests discuss different topics concerning performance, ranging from common performance problems for specific technology platforms to best practices in development, testing, deploying and monitoring software performance and user experience. Be prepared to learn a lot about metrics.Andi & Brian both work at Dynatrace, where they get to witness more real world customer performance issues than they can TPS report at.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Aug 5, 2024 • 38min
Using Observability to Prioritize CrowdStrike Remediation with Josh Wood
When thousands of systems show a blue screen - which ones do you fix first to quickly bring up your most critical systems? For that you need to know which systems are impacted, which mission critical applications run on it, and which depending systems are also impacted by something like the recent CrowdStrike incident!We have invited Josh Wood, Principal Solutions Engineer at Dynatrace, who was one of the first responders helping organizations to leverage observability data to identify which systems to fix first to bring critical apps such as ATMs, Self-Service Terminals, POS (Point of Sales), ... back up again quickly.In this special episode Josh is walking us through the technical details of the CrowdStrike BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), what caused it, how to leverage observability to get a priorities list of systems to fix first and what organizations can do to prevent software impacting issues in the future.Here the links we discussed in the episode:Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadwood/Josh's blog on CrowdStrike BSOD: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/crowdstrike-bsod-quickly-find-machines-impacted-by-the-crowdstrike-issue/CrowdStrike Incident Takeaway Blog: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/crowdstrike-incident-revisiting-vendor-quality-control/

Jul 15, 2024 • 53min
Is it the time for WebAssembly (Wasm) to take off with Matt Butcher
WebAssembly runs in every browser, provides secure and fast code execution from any language, runs across multiple platforms and has a very small binary footprint. It's adopted by several of the big web-based SaaS solutions we use on a daily basis. But where did WebAssembly come from? What problems does it try to solve? Has it reached critical adoption? And how about observing code that gets executed in browsers, servers or embedded devices?To answer all those questions we invited Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon, who explains the history, current implementation status, limitations and opportunities that WebAssembly provides.Further links we disucssedLinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbutcher/Fermyon Dev Website: https://developer.fermyon.com/ The New Stack Blog with Matt: https://thenewstack.io/webassembly-and-kubernetes-go-better-together-matt-butcher/

Jul 1, 2024 • 53min
Decrypting software reliability into a plain English with Ash Patel
"Because I don't want software to go down every single day in my next gig!" is what drives the motivation of Ash Patel, Reliability Advocate and Podcast host of SREpath, to talk about and educate IT professionals on the importance of building and operating reliable systems.For 15 years Ash used to be Director of Operations at a private health service organization. He has experienced that patients couldn't get the treatment they expected due to unreliable software he was responsible for. In our conversation Ash talks about how he had to close the knowledge gap on technology but also solve the problem by having engineers understand the pain and the requirements of their end users. One way to educate more engineers is through his podcast called SREpath where Observability has become a hot topic recently. Tune in, hear about the memorable stories from his guests from CapitalOne, IKEA and SquaredUp, and lets move towards a world where software is reliable by default.Links as discussed today:Ash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ash-patel-srepath/SREpath Podcast: https://www.srepath.com/podcast/Clearing Delusions in Observability https://read.srepath.com/p/30-clearing-delusions-in-observability-2af Boosting your observability data's usability https://read.srepath.com/p/35-boosting-your-observability-datas-3f4 How to Enable Observability for Success https://read.srepath.com/p/40-how-to-enable-observability-for

Jun 17, 2024 • 51min
Platform Engineering Maturity Model: Reaching 10x Efficiency with Abby Bangser
"Meet your users where they are!" - For Platform Engineering Teams that means understanding the current way your engineers work, understand their pain, and provide a solution that doesnt force them to change their behavior but provides a 10x efficiency improvement. Thats not easy to achieve but is what we discussed with Abby Bangser in our latest episodeAbby is a Team Topologies Advocate, has spent years at Thoughtworks helping organizations transform through Delivery Platforms and is now a Lead at the CNCF Platform Working Group. Tune in and hear our discussions on Why Platform Engineering is nothing new, how to avoid Platform Engineering Teams to become your next bottleneck and silo, why Platforms need to have more than one interface and why the purpose of Platform Engineering should be to bring good Developer Experience to all engineersHere all the links we discussed during this episodePlatform Engineering Maturity Model: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platform-eng-maturity-model/CNCF Platform Working Group: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/wgs/platforms/KubeCon 2024 Talk: https://colocatedeventseu2024.sched.com/event/1YFdf/sometimes-lipstick-is-exactly-what-a-pig-needs-abby-bangser-syntasso-whitney-lee-vmwareGitHub Issue for Questionnaire: https://github.com/cncf/tag-app-delivery/issues/635Kratix: https://www.kratix.io/Abbys LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbybangser/Abbys Events: https://www.paintedwavelimited.com/events

Jun 3, 2024 • 49min
How performance engineering saves the euro cup, holidays and keeps cloud costs low with Almudena Vivanco
Requesting more CPU for your database used to take 6 months of planning 20 years ago. Now it takes the execution of a Terraform script. What has stayed the same all those years is Almudena Vivanco's passion for performance engineering to keep systems optimized. Ensuring that systems are available, scalable and resilient even during spike events such as the upcoming Euro Cup or any holiday specials.Tune in and hear from Almudena, who is currently working for SCRM Lidl, on how moving to the cloud gave new justification to performance engineering. She explains the importance of connecting business with service level objectives and gives insights on how Lidl makes sure to sell 50000 pieces of pork without breaking the cloud bankHere the additional links we discussedSlides from Barcelona Meetup: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h83V4gUyqAmIWeAAtKb4BcRvuJV-XirLk-9Xq077nbwVideo from TestCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIP_G-YBy04LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/almudenavivanco/

May 20, 2024 • 53min
Educating the next generation of Observability Heroes with Rainer Schuppe
Making observability available to everyone! This noble goal needs superhero powers in an IT world where there is so much chatter and confusion about what observability is, how to sell the value add besides a glorified troubleshooting tool and how OpenTelemetry will disrupt the landscape.In our latest episode we have Rainer Schuppe, Observability Veteran (more than 20+ years in the space), who has worked for the majority of the observability vendors. He is sharing his observability expertise through workshops in his home town of Mallorca. Teaching organizations from basic to strategic observability implementations.Tune in and learn about the typical adoption and maturity path of observability within enterprises: from fixing a problem at hand, to justifying the cost to keep it until enabling companies to become information driven digital organizations! Also check out his OpenTelemetry journey in his blog post seriesHere are the links we discussed today:Observability Heroes Website: https://observability-heroes.com/Observability Heroes Community: https://observability.mn.co/Cloud Native Mallorca Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/cloud-native-mallorca/OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/Rainer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rainerschuppe/

May 6, 2024 • 48min
eBPF and the Superpowers it unleashes with Liz Rice
eBPF is a kernel technology enabling high-performance, low overhead tools for networking, security and observability. In simpler terms: eBPF makes the kernel programmable!Tune in to this episode whether you have never heard about eBPF, using eBPF based tools such as bcc, Cillium, Falco, Tetragon, Inspector Gadget ... or whether you are developing your own eBPF programs!Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, kicks this episode off with a brief introduction of eBPF, explains how it works, which use cases it has enabled and why eBPF can truly give you super powers! In our conversation we dive deeper into the performance aspects of eBPF: how and why tools like Cillium outperforms classical network load balancers, how performance engineers can use it and how the Kernel internally handles eBPF extecutions.We discussed a lot of follow up material - here are all the relevant links:Liz's slide deck on "Unleashing the kernel with eBPF": https://speakerdeck.com/lizrice/unleashing-the-kernel-with-ebpfeBPF Documentary on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOALearning eBPF GitHub repo accompanying her book: https://github.com/lizrice/learning-ebpf eBPF website: https://epbf.ioLiz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizrice/

Apr 22, 2024 • 52min
From Performance Testing to Designing for Performance with Ernst Ambichl
Use Things you Understand! Learn the fundamentals to understand the layers of abstraction! And remember that we don't live in a world with unlimited resources!These are advice from our recent conversation with Ernst Ambichl, Chief Product Architect at Dynatrace, who has started his performance career in the late 80s building the first load testing tools for databases which later became one of the most successful performance engineering tools in the market.Tune in and learn about how Ernst has evolved from being a performance engineer to become an advocate for "Designing and Architecting for Performance". Ernst explains how important good upfront analysis of performance requirements and characteristics of the underlying infrastructure is, how to define baselines and constantly evaluate your changes against your goals.On a personal note: I want to say THANK YOU Ernst for being one of my personal mentors over the past 20+ years. You inspired me with your passion about performance and building resilient systems

Apr 8, 2024 • 1h 1min
SREs must not be your SWAT Teams with Dana Harrison
SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) have varying roles across different organizations: From Codifying your Infrastructure, handling high priority incidents, automating resiliency, ensuring proper observability, defining SLOs or getting rid of alert fatigue. What an SRE team must not be is a SWAT team - or - as Dana Harrison, Staff SRE at Telus puts it: "You don't want to be the fire brigade along the DevOps Infinity Loop"In his years of experience as an SRE Dana also used to run 1 week boot camps for developers to educate them on making apps observable, proper logging, resiliency architecture patterns, defining good SLIs & SLOs. He talked about the 3 things that are the foundation of a good SRE: understand the app, understand the current state and make sure you know when your systems are down before your customers tell you so!If you are interested in seeing Dana and his colleagues from Telus talk about their observability and SRE journey then check out the On-Demand session from Dynatrace Perform 2024: https://www.dynatrace.com/perform/on-demand/perform-2024/?session=simplifying-observability-automations-and-insights-with-dynatrace#sessions

Mar 25, 2024 • 56min
Why GitOps is not Git plus Automation for Ops with Roberth Strand
Roberth Strand, a CNCF Ambassador and Azure MVP, discusses GitOps, Desired State Management, Continuous Pull vs Pushing from Pipelines, Progressive Delivery, Auto-Scaling, OpenGitOps, Platform Engineering, and GitOps certification. The podcast covers the principles of GitOps in Platform Engineering, misconceptions, Open GitOps Project, Certification Initiatives, and the shift to Platform Engineering.