PurePerformance

In economic turbulent times leaders get asked questions like: “What’s the return on investment of your DevOps or Cloud Transformation? Did we really get better and more efficient? Or did we just blow a lot of money out the window?”Connecting business results with your technical initiatives is what would answer those questions. To learn how this works we invited Adam Dahlgren, SVP Product at Allstacks. From Adam we learn about Value Stream Management, how to align with your top level OKRs and how to improve your DORA and SPACE metrics. Because as Adam says in the beginning: “Inspection is coming especially during turbulent economic times and they will question your investment in transformation projects!” If you want to follow up with Adam check out the following links we discussed:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-dahlgren/What are DORA Metrics: https://www.allstacks.com/blog/dora-metrics/?hsLang=enWhat is the SPACE Framework: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124Allstack: https://www.allstacks.com/DevOps World sessions from Allstack: https://events.devopsworld.com/widget/cloudbees/devopsworld22/conferenceSessionDetails?tab.day=20220929&search=dora

We all want to leverage technology to solve problems. New and shiny toys are appealing to look which sometimes means we loose the insights on the base technologies that powers most of our connected lives, such as DNS or TLS.In this podcast we invited Philipp Krenn (@xeraa), Dev Advocate Team Lead at Elastic, and learn about DNS, TLS and other bad config changes. We learn about Log4Shell, how the Java Security Manager was a big help in fighting Log4Shell, why its been deprecated and also get his thoughts into CDD (Conference Driven Development)And if you ever visit Vienna – chances are you meet Philipp dancing Waltz with tourists 😊Show Links:To learn more from Philipp start withHis personal website: https://xeraa.net/Twitter: https://twitter.com/xeraaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippkrennHis conference schedule (past & future): https://xeraa.net/events/

How do you a design a feature if you don’t know for whom it is for? How do you define SLOs (Service Level Objectives) if you don’t know what your users expect from you? How do you design performance tests and workloads if you don’t know which user behavior to simulate?In this episode we have Barbara Ogris, Sr Product Experience Designer at Dynatrace, who walks us through the concept of target personas that she helped establish within Dynatrace. It changes product and observability discussions from “as a user I want …” towards “as Archie I have this need …”. Listen in and learn about design thinking, using empathy maps to define your target persona and how this can be applied to many aspects in software engineering.Barbara on Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-ogris-6a0b6011b/Dynatrace Blog: Terminology matters: how to enhance user experience by aligning names with expectationshttps://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/terminology-matters-how-to-enhance-user-experience-by-aligning-names-with-expectations/Atlassian persona template: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/personaMIRO persona template: https://miro.com/aq/ps/templates/personas/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_c[…]aIQobChMI6J7Juqql-QIVCOJ3Ch3jtwWwEAAYASAAEgLxT_D_BwE&loc=9062705Adobe XD: how to define a persona: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/

SRE vs DevOps, SRE or DevOps or is it SRE & DevOps? No better person to ask than somebody that has been an SRE for much longer than our industry is talking about Site Reliability Engineering.Michael Wildpaner, Sr Engineering Director Cloud Security at Google, started as an SRE for Google Maps back in 2006. Fast forward to 2022 Michael has a lot of hands-on experience about the SRE role, the different levels of SRE that one organization can apply and how it connects with DevOps.Tune in and hear his personal stories from more than 15 years at Google. While not everyone is Google – there for sure is a lot we can take out of this conversation. Here some of my personal take awaysCore idea of SRE: take engineers that understand distributed systems and “annoy” / guide developers to build better resilient systems from the startDesign for automation: this already starts with naming your infrastructure (aka – don’t use lord of the rings names)SREs help so that you DO NOT DESIGN yourself into a cornerObservability is the foundation of good SRE as it enables incident management, insights all the way up to user insightsTip: Ensure new hires understand that you have a blameless culture As follow up material check out those linksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-wildpanerTalk at DevOps Fusion 2022: https://devops-fusion.com/en/speaker/michael-wildpaner/

For some out there SLOs (Service Level Objectives) are the silver bullet to building and operating reliable software. But nothing is as shiny on the inside as it looks on the outside.In this episode we invited Stephen Townshend, former Performance Engineer now converted to Site (Slight) Reliability. Stephen (@the_kiwi_sre) has experienced the tough side of establishing SLOs within an organization. It’s a constant battle between focusing on reliability and new features and a lack of change in culture.Listen in and learn about the 9 pre-requisites for SLOs that Stephen has identified such as: having a certain level of observability, define clear business objectives, define ownership and give autonomy or establishing a blameless cultureStephen on Linked inhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/Stephen on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sreHere the additional resources we brought up during our talk:Slight Reliability YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SlightReliabilitySlight Reliability Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1698445Our LinkedIn discussion: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/scottmooreconsulting_7-steps-to-identify-and-implement-effective-activity-6938919857459462144--RI7LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephentownshend/Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_kiwi_sre

Security is everyone’s business. And as everyone seems to be moving to Cloud Native it's important to understand what the security landscape in k8s, containerized apps, serverless, … looks like.To learn more about this we invited Anais Urlichs (@urlichsanais), Developer Advocate at Aqua Security and CNCF Ambassador of the year 2021. Over the past years Anais has educated thousands of people on cloud native, devops and security on her YouTube Channel.Tune in and learn more about the different approaches to security in cloud native, which open source projects are out there and how her advise on embedding security in your day2day work.Some additional links we discussed can be found here:Anais on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/urlichsanais/Anais on Twitter: https://twitter.com/urlichsanaisTrivy: https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivyWeekly DevOps Newsletter: https://anaisurl.com/WTFisSRE Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zL61AiOaK0Anais’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/AnaisUrlichsAqua Open Source YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb4mfRT5UWpjoUQRcIE2qOQ

While this episode started out with a recap of April Edwards (@TheAprilEdwards) keynote called “Putting the Ops into DevOps” we quickly got April talk about what measures Microsoft has set to embrace the cultural change needed for their DevOps transformation: Every service has a public health dashboard, putting the customer in the center, make products open source, eat your own dog food, align your objectives with the team, …Besides this great conversation that finally gave some great input on what cultural change really looks like we learned from her background in Ops, moving to Dev, getting into the cloud and now inspiring Ops teams to have it easier in their job using automation. Tune in, learn and get inspired. We also talked about the late Abel Wang and how Microsoft UK is supporting Girls Who Code.Show Links:April on Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/azureapril/April on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/TheAprilEdwardsPutting the Ops into DevOps keynotehttps://globalazure.at/sessions/#323994Supporting Girls Who Code in memory of Abel Wanthttps://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/msbuild2022/?WT.mc_id=modinfra-67727-apedward

Feature Flagging has gained a lot of momentum which we can observe by counting the number of feature flagging solutions. To ensure a good developer experience when implementing feature flags the CNCF OpenFeature project was launched during KubeCon 2022 in Valencia. It is aiming to provide a feature flag standard similar to what OpenTelemetry did for Observability.Tune in to this podcast where we have two of the founding members Mike Beemer and Todd Baert explain why it was the right time to initiate the project, which problems it solves and what use cases feature flagging brings to organizations.If you want to learn more about the project check out the following resources discussed during the podcastWebSite: https://openfeature.dev/GitHub: https://github.com/open-featureCommunity: https://github.com/open-feature/communityITPro Today Launch Coverage: https://www.itprotoday.com/testing-and-quality-assurance/open-source-openfeature-project-takes-flight-advance-feature-flags

How do you plan for unplanned work such as fixing systems when they unexpectedly break in production? Just like firefighters – the best approach to practice those situations so that you are better prepared when they happen.In this episode we have Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, explain why she loves Game Days where she is “practicing for the weird things that might happen”. Prior to her current role she worked for Chef and AOL – picking up a lot of the things she is now advocating for. In our conversation Mandi (@lnxchk) gives us insights into how to best prepare and run game days, shared her thoughts on what good chaos scenarios (unreliable backend, slow dns …) are and which health metrics (team health, # incidents out of hours, …) to look at in your current incident response to figure out what a good game day scenario actually is.Mandi on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandiwalls/In our talk we mentioned a couple of resources – here they are:Mandi’s talk at DevOpsDays Raleigh: https://devopsdays.org/events/2022-raleigh/program/mandi-wallsOps Guides: https://www.pagerduty.com/ops-guides/

“The most significant body of my SRE work is architectural reviews, disaster and failover planning and help with SLIs and SLOs of applications that would like to become SRE supported.”This statement comes from Hilliary Lipsig, Principal SRE at Red Hat, as her introduction to what the role of an SRE should be. Hilliary and her teams are helping organizations getting their applications cloud native ready so that the operational aspect of keeping a system up & running and within Error Budgets can be handled by an SRE Team.Listen in to this episode and learn about the key advices she has for every organization that wants to build and operate resilient systems. And understand why every suggestion she makes has to be and will always be evidence-based!In the talk we mentioned a couple of tools and practices. Here are the links:Hilliary on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilliary-lipsig-a5935245/KubeLinter: https://docs.kubelinter.ioListen to talk Helm and Back again: an SRE Guide to choosing from DevConf.cz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQuK6txYS3g