

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

Oct 23, 2023 • 50min
Don't burst in Flames: 20 years of Performance Engineering with Martin Spier
Martin Spier was one of six engineers to take care of all of Netflix Operations about 10 years ago. Back then performance and observability tools weren't as sophisticated and didn't scale to the needs of Netflix as some do today. FlameScope was one of the Open Source projects that evolved out of that period, visualizing Flame Graphs on a time-scaled heatmap to identify specific performance patterns that caused issues in their complex systems back then.Tune in to this episode and hear more performance and observability stories from Martin, about his early days in Brazil, his time at Expedia and Netflix and about his current role as VP of Engineering at PicPay - one of the hottest fin techs in Brazil.More links we discussed:Performance Summit talk about FlameCommander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L58GrWcrD00CMG Impact talk on Real User Monitoring at Netflix: https://www.cmg.org/2019/04/impact-2019-real-user-performance-monitoring-at-netflix-scale/Learn more about Vector: https://netflixtechblog.com/extending-vector-with-ebpf-to-inspect-host-and-container-performance-5da3af4c584bMartin's GitHub: https://github.com/spiermarConnect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinspier/

Oct 9, 2023 • 17min
Inside Africa - Cloud Native Observability Journeys with Kelvin Klein
Africa is not only the second largest continent in the world - its also top when it comes to adoption of cloud native technologies. I was fortunate to spend a week in South Africa and had the chance to spend a lot of time with Kelvin Klein, Dynatrace Product Manager at Mediro ICT. After two observability events in Johannesburg and Cape Town and several meetings with local tech leaders I got to sit down with Kelvin and learn more about the status of Observablity, Cloud Native and Security in South Africa.

Sep 25, 2023 • 11min
The Future of Ops is Sleep with Amit Chiba from Nedbank
I was fortunate to travel to South Africa and meet many tech leaders in Johannesburg and Cape Town to talk about Observability, Security, Automation, Platform Engineering, DevOps and FinOps. One of those leaders is Amit Chiba, Multi Product Specialist at Nedbank. I sat down with Amit to discuss his personal journey and his projects at Nedbank, one of the leading financial institutions in South Africa. Tune in and hear from Amit how self-service platform engineering helps them to scale observability, how they tackle cloud costs and why he thinks that the future of IT Ops is more Sleep!

Sep 11, 2023 • 44min
Developer Productivity Engineering: Its' more than buying faster hardware with Trisha Gee
Do you measure build times? On your shared CI as well as local builds on the developers workstations? Do you measure how much time devs spend in debugging code or trying to understand why tests or builds are all of a sudden failing? Are you treating your pre-production with the same respect as your production environments?Tune in and hear from Trisha Gee, Developer Champion at Gradle, who has helped development teams to reduce wait times, become more productive with their tools (gotta love that IDE of yours) and also understand the impact of their choices to other teams (when log lines wake up people at night). Trisha explains in detail what there is to know about DPE (Developer Productivity Engineering), how it fits into Platform Engineering, why adding more hardware is not always the best solution and why Flaky Tests are a passionate topic for Trisha.Here the links to Trishas social media, her books and everything else we discussed during the podcastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishagee/Trishas Website: https://trishagee.com/Trisha's Talk on DPE: https://trishagee.com/presentations/developer-productivity-engineering-whats-in-it-for-me/Trisha's Books: https://trishagee.com/2023/07/31/summer-reading-2023/Dave Farley on Continuous Delivery: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCfqyGl3nq_V0bo64CjZh8g

Aug 28, 2023 • 1h 1min
Serverless Observability needs a paradigm shift with Toli Apostolidis
Only a few can claim they have successfully created a Pure-Serverless architecture and only those really understand the challenges of observing real event driven architectures. Apostolis Apostolidis (also known as Toli) is one of those people and its why we invited him back to discuss all the lessons learned from his time as Head of Engineering Practices at cinch. Tune in and learn about the evoluation of Serverless observability and the challenges when observing API Gateways, Queues and Step Functions. Listen to Toli's advice on picking one observability vendor, doing your own custom instrumentation and making yourself familiar with the observability data from your managed service provider.Also go back to our previous episode to hear more from his Engineering Practices for Success and remember that the time to ask about coldstarts is over 🙂 Additional links we discussed today:Previous Podcast with Toli: https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/unlocking-the-power-of-observability-engOpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/AWS Step Functions: https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/Dynatrace Business Flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0bSzvQrUzA

Aug 14, 2023 • 54min
Practical Platform Engineering vs the Marketing Hype with Maurico (Salaboy) Salatino
Codifying Golden Paths that ideally don't need you to build a K8s Operator! This is what Practical Platform Engineering should look like!In our latest episode we learn from Maurico (Salaboy) Salatino who has been contributing to open source for the past 12 years. Tune in and learn from his journey of designing and built platforms. He shares his opinion on the Platform Engineering skillsets, how to design for self-service, how to pick the right tools out of the 160+ CNCF project options and shares some of his favorite tools (including Crossplane, VCluster, Argo, OpenFeature, Keptn ...) that should be part of a modern cloud native platform.Links discussed in this podcast:Salaboy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/salaboySalaboy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salaboy/Upcoming Book: https://www.salaboy.com/book/Cloud-Native Snapshots: https://www.salaboy.com/cloud-native-snapshots/Diagrid: https://www.diagrid.io/

9 snips
Jul 31, 2023 • 48min
Sifting through the Noise of Platform Engineering with Saim Safdar
Reducing the cognitive load by simplifying computing for every developer in an organization! One of the many definitions of Platform Engineering. But what is Platform Engineering for real? Just a new hype? What problem does it really solve? How does it link with DevOps and SRE? Are there any standards or reference architectures available?To get a new perspective on Platform Engineering we invited Saim Safdar, CNCF Ambassador and member of the CNCF TAG App Delivery Platform Working Group. Tune in and learn about the Platform Maturity Model, how to get involved to shape the field of Platform Engineering, what other people that Saim has interviewed are good to follow and much more ..Here the links we discussed:CNCF Platforms White Paper: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platformsMaturity Model Working Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bP8-LQ-d41eIdQB3IC2YsncDhawpFLggql2JxwtE0XI/editPlatform Working Group: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/about/wg-platforms/Cloud Native Podcast with Alexis Richardson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6D-NYkVp9EPatterns and Anti-Patterns: https://octopus.com/devops/platform-engineering/patterns-anti-patterns/Saim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saim-safder/

8 snips
Jul 17, 2023 • 47min
Unlocking the Power of Observability: Engineering Practices for Success with Toli Apostolidis
In this episode, we are joined by Apostolis Apostolidis, Head of Engineering Practices at cinch. He discusses the importance of Observability Driven Development, implementing observability best practices, understanding real user monitoring for UX, and the use of logs and traces in observability.

Jul 3, 2023 • 44min
Observability Evolution: From Sys Admin to Digital Readiness Manager with Mark Forrester
Do you know why customers spend more money at a pub when ordering at a table vs ordering directly from at the bar tender? Do you want to know how to get SaaS vendors to send you their observability & telemetry data? Do you want to know the career path of how an Infrastructure Analyst turned Digitial Readiness Manager?Tune in to this PurePerformance episode where we sat down with Mark Forrester from Mitchell & Butlers answering all these questions and also drawing the parallels to Observability. Because observability has come a long way just as Mark: From traditional infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Network) to APM (Service Response Time & Failure Rates), to Real User Behaviour and now End-2-End Business Processes Analytics. Unlocking the potential of Digitial Business Observability lets Mark optimize the end-2-end customer journey to make sure their customers always feel like they are taken care of when trying to order online food delivery, a meal or a drink at a restaurant. As you learn, digital business observability goes beyond your own digital premise and needs to tap into the data of your 3rd party suppliers and SaaS vendors.To see more from Mark also check out his interview at Dynatrace Perform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGpduOrPxpU

Jun 19, 2023 • 54min
The De-Facto Standard of Metrics Capture and Its Untold Histogram Story with Björn Rabenstein
As far as we know - besides Kubernetes there is only Prometheus that belongs to the prestigious group of open-source projects that have their own documentary. Now why is that? Prometheus has emerged as the go-to solution for capturing metrics in modern software stacks, earning its status as the de facto standard. With its widespread adoption and a constantly expanding ecosystem of companion tools, Prometheus has become a pivotal component in the software development landscape.Join us as we sit down with Björn Rabenstein, an accomplished engineer at Grafana, who has dedicated nearly a decade to actively contributing to the Prometheus project. Björn takes us on a journey through the project's early days, unravels the reasons behind its meteoric rise, and provides us with insightful technical details, including his personal affinity for Histograms.Here are the links we discussed during the podcast for you to follow up:Prometheus Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT4fJNbfe14First Prometheus talk at SRECon 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFiEq3yYpI8The Zen of Prometheus: https://the-zen-of-prometheus.netlify.app/Talk from Observability Day KubeCon 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgINvIK9SYcSecret History of Prometheus Histograms: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/histograms/Prometheus Histograms: https://promcon.io/2019-munich/talks/prometheus-histograms-past-present-and-future/Native Histograms: https://promcon.io/2022-munich/talks/native-histograms-in-prometheus/PromQL for Histograms: https://promcon.io/2022-munich/talks/promql-for-native-histograms/