TestGuild Devops Toolchain Podcast

Welcome back to the TestGuild performance and SRE podcast, I'm your host Joe, and today we're diving into the world of frontend performance testing. As we all know, the majority of end user response time is spent on the frontend, and yet, it's an area that is often overlooked in performance testing. That's why I'm thrilled to have Marie Cruz, a Developer Advocate at k6_io & grafana, on the show today to talk about xk6-browser, a tool that combines backend and frontend performance testing into one powerful package. This session was taken from my anual Automation Guild conference that took place this Feb. If you missed you can get instant access to all the sessions that took place at AutomationGuild.com. Marie will take us through why frontend performance is just as important as backend performance, and why performance testing is about more than just load testing. She'll then introduce us to xk6-browser, an extension to k6 that adds browser-level scripting APIs to interact with real browsers and collect frontend metrics as part of your k6 tests. With xk6-browser, you'll be able to measure how your frontend is behaving during certain events which would be difficult to catch from the protocol-level. So, whether you're a performance engineer or a developer looking to optimize your web application's user experience, this episode is for you. Listen up!

Join us today as we explore the world of performance testing big data with our QA advocate Vishnu Nair and Principal QA engineer Vijay Gavane. Learn about their experiences in testing big data systems, their challenges, and the strategies they used to overcome them. Discover how to test to ensure performance when dealing with tremendous amounts of data that needs to be ingested, stored, and searched simultaneously. Get ready for an exciting and informative episode!

Welcome to the world of software development, where applications have become increasingly complex and are built to run through micro-services, Kubernetes clusters, serverless, and more. But with these advancements come new challenges, particularly in troubleshooting and debugging. In this episode, Eran Kinsbruner, Global Head of Product Marketing at Lightrun, will share a  better and unique way to understand the behavior of your live applications. Discover why the traditional approach of adding more logs and re-deploying the app is costly, time-consuming, and can impact business and SLAs. But what if we told you there was an alternative solution? Enter dynamic instrumentation and logging, a game-changer in software development. Join us as we delve into this innovative solution and explore how it can help developers be more agile, productive, and efficient while reducing app development costs. 

Managing the performance of complex systems requires more than simply running load tests. You need to perform a careful analysis of test results and production metrics. The sheer amount of data generated makes analysis a challenge that is often left wanting. With machine learning (ML) and the application of data science techniques, you can derive valuable and actionable information from big data. In this episode, Gopal Brugalette, a Sr. Performance Architect/Manager/Software Engineer/ shares the basic concepts behind ML, covering clustering, predictive analysis, and neural networks. He shows you how to implement algorithms using open-source tools and languages like Python, R, and AWS cloud services. With real-world examples, Gopal demonstrates the big data platforms Hadoop, Elasticsearch, and AWS Sagemaker. He illustrates performance engineering problems like performance monitoring, test result comparisons, error message analysis, and user insights. Also, Performance testing is a critical skill that is becoming increasingly important for organizations. Still, unfortunately, it is not a skill many testers possess—having an application that is not performant and not meeting your customer's expectations can be dangerous to your company's reputation and bottom line. Sometimes, it can lead to layoffs as organizations try to cut costs. I believe that anything that can be automated in the SDLC, even if it's not a functional test, should be handled by testers and automation engineers. As a tester, you might think you don't need to know performance testing, but trust me, you do. A tester with multiple testing skills is much more valuable to the company. That is why I'd like to invite you to this year's online Automation Guild. The last two days of the conference (part of the 5-day ticket) include many sessions on performance testing. Register Now: https://guildconferences.com/ag-2023/

Did you know why failures are your friend when it comes to testing? In this episode, Benjamin Wilms, co-founder of Steadybit, shares his views on resilience testing. Discover the difference between reliability, chaos, and resilience engineering, how resilience is a team sport, testing best practices, and how the Steadybit platform can help. Listen up!

Do you want to know about an open-source performance toolbox that can help you plan your performance efforts? In this episode, Josef Mayrhofer, the founder of Performetriks, shares how you can improve the performance of your application. Discover an open-source performance toolbox that Josef and his team have created to help calculate concurrent users, session time, and other critical performance metrics. Also, listen in to hear about the role of AI in performance analysis and the future of performance engineering. 

What does BBQ have to do with performance testing and engineering? In this episode, Scott Moore, a well know industry Perfvangelist, shares all about the unique Performance Tour (theperformancetour.com). Discover what he's learned from a continuous road trip through different regions of the US, meeting with experts in the IT community and sharing knowledge and best practices. Listen to top trends for 2022 and future performance engineering predictions for 2023 and beyond.

In this episode, I’ll speak with 12 speakers (Federico Toledo, Mark Tomlinson, Leandro Melendez, Henrik Rexed, Anisbert Suárez, Roger Abelenda, Laura Gayo, Nicolás Paez, Lucía Lavagna, Gerencia, Vera Babat, Mercedes Quintero Martínez & Andy Hohenner) from the upcoming Quality Sense Conference in Uruguay on Dec 9th. Many of the sessions taking place cover Performance and SRE-related topics. I had planned on being there myself, but I have other commitments I need to honor, BUT it’s not too late for you. I had planned on being there myself, but I have other commitments I need to honor, BUT it’s not too late for you. After listening to this episode to the end, go to QualitySenseConf.com and register for free to attend this conference in person or watch it online. Discover more about OpenTelemetry, performance testing, measure and metrics, Chaos Engineering, and more.  

What is Platform Engineering? In this episode, Evan Niedojadlo, an engineer at Peddle, shares his real-world experience with Platform Engineering. Discover if Platform Engineering is yet another extension of DevOps practices, the difference from SRE, Platform Metrics, the future of platform engineering, and more.

Want an easy way to query, visualize, and understand metrics and logs in your infrastructure? In this episode, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen is the founder of Fiberplane shares a new to enhance your SRE collaboration. Discover all about collaborative notebooks for resolving incidents, coordinating work related to downtime, how to build up a structured knowledge base, and more. Try Fiberplane yourself: https://studio.fiberplane.com/ Learn more about Fiberplanes features: http://docs.fiberplane.com/