PurePerformance

Did you know that almost 60 years after IBM presented the mainframe 92 of the worlds top 100 banks run mainframes handling 90% of all credit card transactions? We didn’t either until we recorded this episode with Christian Schram, Solutions Engineer at Dynatrace, who has spent the last 20+ years helping organizations optimizing their mainframe environments. Tune in and learn about the mainframe, how the cloud native project OpenTelemetry has made it to the mainframe and what the most common performance patterns are on the mainframe.As discussed check out the following links in case you want to learn more:A Brief History of the Mainframe World (Blog)Modernizing the Mainframe (YouTube)Eliminating inefficiencies on IBM Z (Blog)End-2-End IBM Z transactional visibility (Blog)

Do you know that 53% of security related issues on Kubernetes are caused by misconfiguration? Me neither!To raise the awareness of how to protect your Kubernetes cluster and workloads from being hijacked we invited Nico Meisenzahl, Microsoft MVP and GitLab Hero, to walk us through a set of best practices that everyone in cloud native should know to contribute to a more secure cloud native environment. In our conversation we cover a lot of what Nico has shown in his recent talks at different container, cloud native and security related conferences.Make sure you check out the slides, github tutorials and recordings from Nico through those links:Nico’s Website: https://meisenzahl.org/Hijack a Kubernetes Cluster YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wc34MozKokHijack a Kubernetes Cluster Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/nmeisenzahl/containerconf-2022-hijack-kubernetesHijack a Kubernetes Cluster GitHub Tutorial: https://github.com/nmeisenzahl/hijack-kubernetesConnect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicomeisenzahl/Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nmeisenzahl If you want to hear more from Nico listen until the end and pick from one of the suggested topics

Incidents happen! And when asking Laura Nolan who was an SRE at Google and Slack, healthy organizations should take proper time to analyze and learn from them. This will improve future incident response as well as overall system resiliency.Tune in to this episode and hear Laura’s tips & tricks what makes a good SRE organization. It starts with doing good write ups of incidents, doing your research on incident reports of software and services that you are looking into using. We also spent a good amount of time discussing root cause analysis where she highlighted an incident that happened at her time at Google and what she learned about outdated alerting.Thanks Laura for a great discussion and lots of insights.Here are the additional links we discussed during the podcastLaura on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-nolan-bb7429/Laura on Twitter:https://twitter.com/lauraliftsIncident Template talk @ SRECon: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon22emea/presentation/nolan-breakWhat SRE could be talk @ SRECon: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon22emea/presentation/nolan-sreHowie Post-Incident Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie/welcomeMy philosophy on Alerting article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/199PqyG3UsyXlwieHaqbGiWVa8eMWi8zzAn0YfcApr8Q/edit

What a year 2022 was! We had 25! episodes with amazing guests from all over the world covering topics from Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, DevOps, SRE, Cloud Migrations, DNS, Value Streams all the way to Persona Driven Engineering and drawing parallels with Digital Marketing. If you are new to our podcast check out the playlist and listen to some of those we mentioned during our episode!Now its time to say Thank You listeners for the continued support. After 5+ years of podcasting we still see rising numbers of downloads which is the best motivation for us to keep going. Stay tuned as we are going to cover industry relevant topics going into 2023 – or is it year 53? (only those will know that listen to the full episode)

“If I wouldn’t measure it I wouldn’t know it!” or “Build, Measure, Learn! ”These quotes could be from any engineer building new digital services, observing them in production and based on that learn how to improve their software.They are however from Bernhard Dominguez, Digital Consultant at FACTOR, who we invited to the show. Bernhard highlights a lot of parallels between his work planning and executing digital marketing strategies and the world we live in: designing, operating and optimizing complex software systems.Tune in and learn about how important it is to understand your real target groups (=end users), how to define clear goals (=SLOs), how to change from campaign to funnel activities (=User Journeys) and why it is so important to get an outsider’s opinion before implementing your next big project! (=We have always done it this way) If you want to follow up with Bernhard and his work check out the following links we discussed during the podcast:Bernhard on LinkedInFACTORPodcast (German): Newsletter MarketingPodcast (German): Build - Measure - Learn

You have a CISO (Chief Security Information Officer) but no CRO (Chief Reliability Officer)? You blame people if systems crash? You scale your people in the rate of scaling your infrastructure? If you answer any of those questions with YES then you should tune into this podcast as you probably struggle adopting Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in your organization.James Brookbank, Cloud Solutions Architect, has dealt with resiliency topics in a large enterprise prior to joining Google. In our conversation he shares advice he gives Enterprises to convert the excitement about SRE into actual implementation. James gave some good guidance on what good and not so good projects are to start with. He gives practical examples on what it means to change your company culture and why there doesn’t have to be an SRE for every service.In our call we discussed the SRE in Enterprise talk at DevOpsDays Boston and SRECon EMEA as well as their recent book. Here are all the relevant links:James Brookbank on Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbrookbank/SRECon EMEA Slides: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/srecon22_slides_mcghee.pdfDevOpsDays Boston 2022 Session Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__e7b25QOHcEnterprise Roadmap to SRE Book: https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/enterprise-roadmap-to-sre/

Dynatrace recently announced Grail – promising boundless observability, security and business analytics in context.You may think: that’s a lot of nice words that other solutions claim as well. So why should you care about Grail? What is the real problem it solves and how does it solve it?Tune in and hear from Andreas Lehofer, Chief Product Officer at Dynatrace as he boils it down to two critical issues:* Cost vs Value of your data: Current approaches are expensive as you keep 95% of your data not knowing whether you ever need it!* Functional Limits with having siloed observability data: When you need answers the current siloed approach is slow and limited!Thanks Andreas for the discussion, the insights on the hidden costs of current approaches, the technical explanation on our architecture as well as giving us some glimpse on what’s coming next.Show Links:Dynatrace Grail Announcement:https://www.dynatrace.com/platform/grail/Andreas Lehofer on Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaslehofer/

“I was not that interested in coding but more in understanding the impact of software on human beings” says Diana Najda, SRE & Monitoring Lead, when we asked her how she ended up leading the efforts around Site Reliability Engineering.Tune in to our conversation and learn how Diana is bridging the gap between Dev, Ops and Business by ensuring that the right people get the right telemetry data from their observability platform. She gives us insights into her definition of DevOps and SRE, how she helps teams setting up SLOs (Service Level Objectives) and how she proves the ROI (Return On Investment) into the SRE practices!Last piece of advice Diana gives everyone interested: “SRE might be buzzword it loses the buzz the more you hear it – BUT - its really cool because SREs make the life of Dev and Ops easier every day”If you want to connect with Diana reach her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diannajda/

Serverless and other emerging technologies hide the complexity of the underlying runtimes from developers. This is great for productivity but can make it really hard when troubleshooting behavior that needs deeper insight into those runtimes, platforms or frameworks.In this episode we hear from Kam Lasater, Founder of Cyclic Software. Kam has run into several walls while he was implementing solutions from scratch using Serverless technologies as well as other popular cloud services. He recently presented a handful of those scenarios at DevOpsDays Boston 2022.Tune in and learn from Kam as he walks us through two of those challenges he covered during his DevOpsDays talk. If you want to learn more make sure to watch the full talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB9vsSl93mE If you want to learn more from or about Kam check out the following links:YouTube video from DevOpsDays Boston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB9vsSl93mECyclic Website: https://www.cyclic.sh/Cyclic Blog: https://www.cyclic.sh/blog/Twitter: https://twitter.com/seekayelPersonal Website: https://kamlasater.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamlasater/

Over the years we learned how to optimize the performance of our JVMs, our CLRs or our databases instances by tweaking settings around heap sizes, garbage collection behavior or connection and thread pools.As we move our workloads to k8s we need to adapt our optimization efforts as they are new nobs to turn. We need to factor in how resource and request limits on pods impact your application runtimes that run on your clusters. Out of memory problems are all of a sudden no longer just depending on the java heap size alone!To learn more about k8s optimization best practices we have invited Stefano Doni, CTO of Akamas. Stefano walks us through key learnings as the team at Akamas has helped organizations optimize the performance, resiliency and cost of their k8s workloads. You will learn about proper memory settings, CPU throttling and how to start saving costs as you move more workloads to k8s. To learn more about Akamas go here: https://www.akamas.io/If you happen to be at KubeCon 2022 in Detroit make sure to visit their boothShow Links:Stefano on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanodoni/A Guide to Autonomous Performance Optimization with Dynatrace and Akamas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7MuEjeOvX0