Pureperformance

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

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

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 Humantic, 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

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

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

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

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 @

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

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://w

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/blo

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 v

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.

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

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/Atl

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 i

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:/