

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

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/

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/

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/

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/

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

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

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/


