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PurePerformance

Latest episodes

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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
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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/
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Jun 5, 2023 • 34min

GraphQL, API Gateways, API-Led Growth – How to make APIs Observable with Sonja Chevre

APIs are powering and empowering software innovation as they enable new use cases on top of existing services. Observability into API usage to answer questions like: how APIs are called, what APIs do, where APIs fail, where APIs are slow, where APIs are misused … has to be on top of mind for architects that decide to build or use APIs.In this episode we welcome Sonja Chevre, Group Product Manager at Tyk, who recently gave a captivating talk at KubeCon about using OpenTelemetry to get insights into popular API frameworks such as GraphQL. We are discussing common challenges for SREs such as that APIs often hide the status of a call behind an HTTP 200 or that debugging individual calls is really hard as details of the call are not exposed by default to telemetry data. We also cover topics such as API-led growth, API as a product as well as open standards such as OpenTelemetry and OpenAPI. Here the list of discussed links during the show:KubeCon Talk: https://kccnceu2023.sched.com/event/1HyVc/what-could-go-wrong-with-a-graphql-query-and-can-opentelemetry-help-sonja-chevre-ahmet-soormally-tyk-technologiesAPI Management vs Gateway discussion: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sonjachevre_apimanagement-apigateway-apisecurity-activity-7061596404854521857-N_cO/API as a Product: https://tyk.io/blog/unlocking-the-potential-of-api-as-a-product/OpenAPI: https://www.openapis.org/OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/
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May 22, 2023 • 52min

Why Cyber Defense is Hard: A Closer Look at the latest security research with Stefan Achleitner

Security comes with a price tag, such as additional wait time when going through checks at the airport or when inspection network packages at your firewall.To learn about current approaches to cyber defense and cyber deception we invited back Stefan Achleitner, Lead Researcher Cloud Native Security at Dynatrace. Tune in and learn why it is important to keep changing and using different passwords, why you should monitor all your servers, what zero day vulnerabilities are, the role of eBPF in security and why we have to minimize false positives alarms like the Hawaii Missile Alert! Some of the links we discussed during the podcast can be found here:Our previous episode: https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/don-t-look-away-from-the-next-cyber-secuHawaii false missile alert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alerteBPF on isitobservable: https://isitobservable.io/search?q=eBPFCheck if you've been compromised: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Stefan’s SolarWinds Article (German): https://intelligente-welt.de/so-funktionierte-der-angriff-auf-solarwinds/Stefan's Problem wiht Passwords Article (German): https://intelligente-welt.de/passwort-manager-und-andere-loesungen-fuers-passwort-chaos/
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May 8, 2023 • 50min

Unlocking the Power of OpenTelemetry: Insights from an OTel Expert at NWM

36 million generated OpenTelemetry spans per hour for GraphQL based queries – that’s just one of the stats we discussed with Justin Scherer, Sr Developer and Consultant, who is leading OTel adoption and Shift-Left observability efforts at NWM. For Justin, OpenTelemetry helps commoditize data gathering in modern cloud native environments so that the backend observability platform of choice can focus on answering higher level business impacting questions.If you are about to roll out OpenTelemetry in your organization then take the advice from Justin such as: Bringing Business Leaders early into the discussion! Engage with the OpenTelemetry community! Understand what your Observability Platform already gives you and focus on the gaps! To learn more about OpenTelemetry check out some of the links we discussed during the podcast:OpenTelemetry Website: https://opentelemetry.io/IsItObservable: https://isitobservable.io/open-telemetryPodcast: https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/adopting-open-observability-across-your-LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-scherer-198126160/
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Apr 24, 2023 • 56min

Adopting Open Observability Across Your Organization with Daniel Gomez Blanco

Organizations that experience Monitoring Data Obesity – having too many arbitrary logs or metrics without context – are suffering twice: high cost for storage and not getting the answers they need!OpenTelemetry, the cloud native standard for observability, solves those challenges and therefore sees rapid adoption from both startups and established enterprises.In this episode we have Daniel Gomez Blanco (@dan_gomezblanco), Principal Software Engineer at Skyscanner and author of the recently published book Practical OpenTelemetry.Tune in and learn about the latest status of OpenTelemetry, lessons learned from adopting OpenTelemetry in a large organization, considerations between metrics and traces, the difference between statistical and tail based sampling and much more Here the links we discussed during the episode:Chat I had with M. Hausenblas on his podcast the other day: https://inuse.o11y.engineering/episode/meet-daniel-skyscannerLink to QCon talk (although I believe the video won't be made available till later in the year) https://qconlondon.com/presentation/mar2023/effective-and-efficient-observability-opentelemetryRecent InfoQ interview covering the talk: https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/03/effective-observability-otel/Video on a talk I did with Ted Young a couple years ago during our tracing migration to OpenTelemetry: https://youtu.be/HExcLWA2b8MTalk at o11yfest 2021 on our tracing migration to OTel: https://vi.to/hubs/o11yfest/videos/3143Mastodon: https://mas.to/@dan_gomezblanco
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Apr 10, 2023 • 58min

The Future of DevOps: Can ChatGPT be Your Ultimate Engineer?

DevOps didn’t die when the world started raving about SRE. And while some proclaim that platform engineering finally kills DevOps it is more an evolutionary process to bring DevOps practices to a new audience that is building and running apps on a new technology stack.But what about ChatGPT? Can it be the best DevOps engineer you ever had? Will it be able to build and optimize our delivery pipelines? Will it tell us which products to build and how? Which architecture to choose and how to best design it for operations?Tune in and hear from Stephen Thair, DevOps Thought Leader and Founder of DevOpsGroup, on what he has seen over the past decade working in the DevOps space and why he thinks that while ChatGPT will be disrupting many jobs it is a great opportunity to boost creativity and efficiency for many DevOps and non DevOps folksAlso don’t miss to read Stephen’s 2023 predictions we mentioned in our discussion
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Mar 27, 2023 • 54min

“You Build It, You Run It Doesn’t Scale!” with Luca Galante

The famous tagline from Werner Vogel in 2006 is still used in many presentations promoting DevOps and the autonomy of development teams. But how long does and did this really scale?Based on our guest Luca Galante, Head of Product at Humanitec, organizations that reach 50-100 engineers start experiencing the first bottlenecks. After initial workarounds sometimes leading to Shadow Ops it’s the time where organizations look into building Internal Development Platforms (IDP). This is where Platform Engineering is born by providing “Golden Paths around DevOps & SRE” as a self-service to engineering teams.Tune in an learn more about the emerging practice of platform engineering, why it already attracted more than 11000 global community members, has an annual dedicated conference and why global analysts are putting Platform Engineering in the Top Trends of 2023! We referenced a lot of material in our discussion. Here all the promised links:What is Platform Engineering: https://platformengineering.org/blog/what-is-platform-engineeringPlatform Engineering Community: https://platformengineering.orgPlatformCon: https://platformcon.com/Platform Weekly: https://platformweekly.com/Follow Luca on Twitter: https://twitter.com/luca_cloudConnect with Luca on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-galante/
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Mar 13, 2023 • 54min

Don’t look away from the next cyber security threat with Stefan Achleitner

While Spring4Shell, Ransomware and attacks on critical infrastructure were the most severe attacks in 2022 the evolving trends in 2023 are around the rising power of AIs, complexity and therefore misconfiguration of cloud native stacks as well as social engineering challenges as part of the post-pandemic shift back towards the office.Tune in and learn from Stefan Achleitner, Lead Researcher Cloud Native Security at Dynatrace, about getting better in securing software supply chain, understanding the impact of attacks and vulnerabilities and why nobody should look away when it comes to detecting and preventing cyber security threats
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Feb 27, 2023 • 53min

Is The Practice of Practice the better Gameday with Matt Davis

How do you prepare yourself for the next incident? Not at all? Are you running game days where you simulate incidents? Or are you following the steps of good musicians who are constantly practicing with their band members to always be best prepared for the next big gig!Tune in and hear from Matt Davis, Specialist in Learning from Incidents, how he runs weekly continuous practice and learning sessions with DevOps, SREs, Developers, Marketers or Technical Writers and what the outcomes are.Matt is a regular presenter at conferences. You can meet him at SRECon Americas 2023 where he talks about “Human Observability of Incident Response” Here the other links we discussed during the podcast:Practice of PracticeRivers of OppositesVarieties of WorkFollow Matt on TwitterConnect on LinkedIn

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