
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.
Latest episodes

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.

Mar 11, 2024 • 53min
What makes GitOps Enterprise Ready with Christian Hernandez
Can you explain GitOps in simple terms? How does it fit into Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment? And what are considerations when rolling out GitOps in an enterprise? To get answers to those questions we sat down with Christian Hernandez, Head of Community at Akuity, who has a fabulous analogy to explain GitOps that I am sure many of us will "borrow" from him. Christian also explains the ecosystem he works in such as ArgoCD, Kargo as well as OpenGitOps which aims to provide open-source standard and best practices to implementing GitOps.We closed the session with some advice around Application Dependency Management, External Secrets Operator and choosing the right Git Repo Structure.Here are some of the links we discussed:OpenGitOps: https://opengitops.dev/ArgoCD: https://argoproj.github.io/cd/Kargo: https://github.com/akuity/kargoArgoCon: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/co-located-events/argocon/GitOpsCon: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/gitopscon-north-america/

Feb 26, 2024 • 44min
Open Mainframe, Zowe, OpenTelemetry: Modernizing the Mainframe with Jessielaine Punongbayan
While the mainframe is powering the world's most critical system the words "modern", "open source" or "generative AI" typically don't come to mind. So lets change this!To do that simply tune in to our latest episode where we have Jessielaine (Jelly) Punongbayan, Sr. Technical Support Engineer at Dynatrace, telling us why she is excited about the modern Mainframe and how it brought her from the Philippines via Singapore and Czech Republic to Austria. We learn about all the open-source projects and communities she is involved in such as Open Mainframe or Zowe that make it easy to connect the Mainframe with the modern tooling of today's development environments. Jelly shares her stories about the role of good observability, how it connects the distributed and the mainframe world and how it enables development teams to build more efficient systems. And what about AI? Well - you have to tune in and listen to the end!Here the links discussed in the episodeWriting a COBOL program using VSCode: https://medium.com/modern-mainframe/beginners-guide-cobol-made-easy-introduction-ecf2f611ac76 Using CircleCI to perform automation in Mainframe: https://medium.com/modern-mainframe/beginners-guide-cobol-made-easy-leveraging-open-source-tools-eb4f8dcd7a98 Using OpenTelemetry to capture Mainframe Insights: https://medium.com/@jessielaine.punongbayan/re-imagining-mainframe-insights-through-open-source-tooling-79dd4c937114Dynatrace support for Mainframe: https://www.dynatrace.com/technologies/mainframe-monitoring/

Feb 12, 2024 • 58min
The 201 Milestone Episode on Automation, AI, CoPilot and more with Mark Tomlinson
201 is the HTTP status code for Resource Created. It is also the number of PurePerformance Episodes (including this one) we have published over the past years. None better to invite than the person who initially inspired us to launch PurePerformance: Mark Tomlinson, Performacologist and Director of Observability at FreedomPayTune in and listen to our thoughts on current state of automation, a recap on IFTTT, whether we believe that AIs such as CoPilot will not only make us more efficient in creating code and scripts but also lead to new ways of automation. We also give a heads-up (or rather a recap) of what Mark will be presenting on at Perform 2024.To learn more about and from Mark follow him on the various social media channels:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtomlins/Performacology: https://performacology.com/

Jan 29, 2024 • 48min
Optimizing Cloud Native Power Consumption using Kepler with Marcelo Amaral
Marcelo Amaral is a Researcher for Cloud System Optimization and Sustainability. With his background in performance engineering where he optimized microservice workloads in containerized environments making the leap towards analyzing and optimizing energy consumption was easy.Tune in to this episode and learn about how Kepler, the CNCF project Marcelo is working on, which provides metrics for workload energy consumption based on power models it was trained on by the community. Marcelo goes into details about how Kepler works and also provides practical advice for any developer to keep energy consumption in mind when making architectural and coding decisions.To learn more about Kepler and the episode today check out:LinkedIn from Marcelo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcamaral/CNCF Blogpost on Kepler: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/10/11/exploring-keplers-potentials-unveiling-cloud-application-power-consumption/Kepler GitHub Repo: https://github.com/sustainable-computing-io/kepler

Jan 15, 2024 • 51min
OpenLLMetry - Observing the Quality of LLMs with Nir Gazit
Its only been a year since ChatGPT was introduced. Since then we see LLMs (Large Language Models) and Generative AIs being integrated into every days life software applications. Developers have the hard choice to pick the right model for their use case to produce the quality of output their end users demand.Tune in to this session where we have Nir Gazit, CEO and Co-founder of Traceloop, educating us about how to observe and quantify the quality of LLMs. Besides performance and costs engineers need to look into quality attributes such as accuracy, readability or grammatical correctness.Nir introduces us to OpenLLMetry - a set of Open Source extensions built on top of OpenTelemetry providing automated observability into the usage of LLMs for developers to better understand how to optimize the usage of LLMs. His advice to every developer is to start measuring the quality of your LLMs on Day 1 and continuously evaluate as you change your model, the prompt and the way you interact with your LLM stack!If you have more questions about LLM Observability check out the following links:OpenLLMetry GitHub Page: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetryTraceloop Website: https://www.traceloop.com/OpenLLMetry Documentation: https://traceloop.com/docs/openllmetry

Jan 1, 2024 • 50min
Why Developers have different Observability Requirements with Liran Haimovitch
After analyzing Distributed Traces over more than 15 years Brian and I thought that everyone in software engineering and operations must be satisfied with all that observability data we have available. But. Maybe Brian and I were wrong because we didn’t fully understand all the use cases - especially those for developers that must fix code in production or need to quickly understand what code from somebody else is really doing without having the luxury to add another log line and redeploy on the fly. To learn more about the observability requirements of developers we invited Liran Haimovitch, CTO at Rookout and now part of Dynatrace, who has spent the last 7 years solving the challenging problems that developers face day and night. Tune in and learn about what non-breaking breakpoints are, how it is possible to "debug in production" without impacting running code and how we can make developers lives easier even though we push so many things "to the left"

Dec 18, 2023 • 11min
Mobile, AI, LLMs, Observability & Resiliency - Key Topics for Banks in Hungary with Adam Gajdi
I was invited to speak at BankTechShow in Budapest, Hungary where the nations IT leaders in the banking sector presented and discussed the future of banking - both in the cloud as well as what it means for the physical bank branches. I got a chance to sit down with Adam Gajdi, IT Solutions CoE Lead at K&H, who walked me through the process of their recent new mobile banking app launch. Adam highlighted the importance of observability for both business owners as well as developers. Furthermore, Adam enlightened me with the fact that Hungarian banks are mandated to conduct chaos tests to proof that their systems are resilient in case of data center outages. I was obviously also curious about how AI, LLMs and other technologies are adopted in their sector. Tune in to learn more

Dec 4, 2023 • 28min
Recap KubeCon 2023 NA, State of Platform Engineering and more with Andi Grabner
Besides attending KubeCon 2023 NA Andreas (Andi) Grabner, co-host of PurePerformance but guest today, has also travelled parts of the US to chat with the broader observablity community on topics such as Platform Engineering, Observability, DevOps, Automation & Security.Tune in and get a quick recap of all the topics Andi has picked up on his recent trip