Pureperformance

HAPPY NEW YEARDaniel Freij (@DanielFreij) – Senior Performance Engineer and Community Manager at Apica – has been doing hundreds of load tests in his career. 5-10 years ago performance engineers used the “well known” load testing tools such as Load Runner. But things have changed as we have seen both a Shift-Left and a Shift-Right of performance engineering away from the classical performance and load testing teams. Tools became easier, automatable and cloud ready. In this session we discuss these changes that happened in the recent years, what it means for today’s engineering teams and also what might happen in 5-10 years from now. We also want to do a shout out to a performance clinic Daniel and Andi are doing on January 25th 2017 where they walk you through a modern cloud based pipeline using AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, Apica and Dynatrace. Registration link can be found here: http://bit.ly/onlineperfclinicRelated Link:ZebraTester Community: https://community.zebratester.com/

Mark Tomlinson, still a veteran and performance god, is enlightening us on his concept of Continuous Acceleration of Performance. Continuous Delivery is all about getting faster feedback from code changes as code gets deployed faster in smaller increments to the end user. One aspect that is often left out is feedback on performance metrics and behavior. In the “old days” performance feedback was given very late – either in the load testing phase at the end of the project lifecycle or even as late as when it hits production. That could be too late and it makes it hard to fix the root cause.Listen to our conversation on how to accelerate performance related feedback loops without getting overwhelmed with too much data!

Mark Tomlinson, “a veteran” in Performance Engineering, discusses how DevOps is a big opportunity for performance engineering – but also a threat for many that have been in the business for a long time. The big question is: are “traditional performance engineers” using their Load Runners or SilkPerformers at the end of the project lifecycle ready to change? Ready to learn new tools? Ready to think about automating performance engineering into the delivery pipeline and doing that in collaboration with the rest of the engineering team? Ready to “Check your Ego at the door”?Listen to our conversation where we also discuss how these roles have changed in organizations we recently interacted with.

In Part II with Finn Lorbeer (@finnlorbeer) from Thoughtworks we discuss some of the new approaches when implementing new software features. How can we build the right thing the right way for our end users?Feature development should start with UX wireframes to get feedback from end users before writing a single line of code. Feature teams then need to define and implement feedback loops to understand how features operate and are used in production. We also discuss the power of A/B testing and canary releases as it allows teams to “experiment” on new ideas and thanks to close feedback loops will quickly learn on how end users are accepting it. *****Related Links:******Process Automation and Continuous Delivery at OTTO.dehttps://dev.otto.de/2015/11/24/process-automation-and-continuous-delivery-at-otto-de/Are we only Test Manager?http://www.lor.beer/are-we-only-test-manager/Sind wir wirklich nur Testmanagerinnen?https://dev.otto.de/2016/06/08/sind-wir-wirklich-nur-testmanagerinnen/

Finn Lorbeer (@finnlorbeer) is a quality enthusiast working for Thoughtworks Germany. I met Finn earlier this year at the German Testing Days where he presented the transformation story at Otto.de. He helped transform one of their 14 “line of business” teams by changing the way QA was seen by the organization. Instead of a WALL between Dev and Ops the teams started to work as a real DevOps team. Further architectural and organizational changes ultimately allowed them to increase deployment speed from 2-3 per week to up to 200 per week for the best performing teams.*****Related Links:******Process Automation and Continuous Delivery at OTTO.dehttps://dev.otto.de/2015/11/24/process-automation-and-continuous-delivery-at-otto-de/Are we only Test Manager?http://www.lor.beer/are-we-only-test-manager/Sind wir wirklich nur Testmanagerinnen?https://dev.otto.de/2016/06/08/sind-wir-wirklich-nur-testmanagerinnen/Das Leben ist hasselhoffhttp://giphy.com/search/david-hasselhoff

Gene Kim has been promoting a lot of the great DevOps Transformation stories from Unicorns (Innovators) but more so from "The Horses" (Early Adopters). The next DOES (DevOps Enterprise Summit) is just on its way helping him with his mission to increase DevOps adoption across the IT world.In our 3 podcast sessions we discussed the success factors of DevOps adoption, the reasons that lead to resistance as well as how to best measure success and enforce feedback loops.Thanks Gene for allowing us to be part of transforming our IT world.Related Link:Get a free digital 160 page DevOps Handbook Excerpthttp://itrevolution.com/handbook-excerpt?utm_source=PurePerformance&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=handbookexcerpt&utm_content=podcast

Gene Kim has been promoting a lot of the great DevOps Transformation stories from Unicorns (Innovators) but more so from "The Horses" (Early Adopters). The next DOES (DevOps Enterprise Summit) is just on its way helping him with his mission to increase DevOps adoption across the IT world.In our 3 podcast sessions we discussed the success factors of DevOps adoption, the reasons that lead to resistance as well as how to best measure success and enforce feedback loops.Thanks Gene for allowing us to be part of transforming our IT world.Related Link:Get a free digital 160 page DevOps Handbook Excerpthttp://itrevolution.com/handbook-excerpt?utm_source=PurePerformance&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=handbookexcerpt&utm_content=podcast

Gene Kim has been promoting a lot of the great DevOps Transformation stories from Unicorns (Innovators) but more so from "The Horses" (Early Adopters). The next DOES (DevOps Enterprise Summit) is just on its way helping him with his mission to increase DevOps adoption across the IT world.In our 3 podcast sessions we discussed the success factors of DevOps adoption, the reasons that lead to resistance as well as how to best measure success and enforce feedback loops.Thanks Gene for allowing us to be part of transforming our IT world.Related Link:Get a free digital 160 page DevOps Handbook Excerpthttp://itrevolution.com/handbook-excerpt?utm_source=PurePerformance&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=handbookexcerpt&utm_content=podcast

Guest Star: Anita Engleder - DevOps Manager at DynatraceIn this second part of our podcast Anita gives us more insights into how new features actually get developed, how they measure their success and how to ensure that the pipeline keeps up with the ever increasing number of builds pushed through it.We will learn more about the day-to-day life at Dynatrace engineering but especially about the “Lifecycle of a Feature, its feedback loop and what the stakeholders are doing to make it a success”Related Links:Dynatrace UFOhttps://github.com/Dynatrace/ufo

Guest Star: Anita Engleder - DevOps Manager at DynatraceAs a follow up to our podcast with Bernd Greifender, CTO and Found of Dynatrace, who talked about his 2012 mission statement to the engineering team: “We go from 6 months 2 weeks release cycles” we now have Anita Engleder, DevOps Lead at Dynatrace on the mic.Anita has been part of that transformation team and in the first episode talks about what happened from 2012 until 2016 where the engineering team is now deploying a feature release every other week, makes 170 production deployment changes per day and can push a code change into production within an hour if necessary. She will give us insights in the processes, the tools but more importantly about the change that happened with the organization, the people and the culture. She will also tell us what she and her “DevOps” team actually contribute to the rest of the organization. Are they just another new silo? Or are they an enabler for engineering to push code faster through their pipeline?

We got to talk with Bernd Greifeneder, Founder and CTO of Dynatrace, who recently gave a talk on “From 0 to NoOps in 80 Days” explaining the “Digital Transformation Story of Dynatrace – the product as well as the company”The transformation started in 2012 when Dynatrace used to deploy 2 major releases of its Dynatrace AppMon & UEM product to the market. The incubation of the startup Ruxit within Dynatrace allowed engineering, marketing and sales to come up with new ways and ideas that allow continuous innovating. In 2016 the incubated team was brought back to Dynatrace to accelerate the “Go To Market” of all the innovations. A new version of its Dynatrace SaaS and Managed offering is now released every 2 weeks with 170 production updates per day. Many aspects were also applied to all other product lines and engineering teams which boosted the output and raised quality of these enterprise products.

Are there new Web Performance Rules since Steve Souders started the WPO movement about 10 years ago? Do we still optimize on round trips or does HTTP/2 change the game? How do we deal with “mobile only” users we find in emerging geographies. How does Google itself optimize its search pages and what can we learn from it. In this session we really got to cover a lot of the presentation Pat Meenan (@patmeenan) did at Velocity this year.Related Links:* Scaling frontend performance - Velocity 2016***** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdebARb8UJk * WEBPAGETEST***** https://www.webpagetest.org* Google AMP***** https://www.ampproject.org/***** https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

Pat Meenan (@patmeenan) is a veteran when it comes to Web Performance Optimization. Besides being the creator of WebPageTest.org he has also done a lot of work recently on the Google Chrome team to make the browser better and faster.During his recent Velocity presentation on “Using Machine Learning to determine drivers for bounce and conversion” he presented some very controversial findings about what really impacts end user happiness. That it was not rendering time but rather DOM Load Time that correlates with conversion and bounce rates. In this session we dig a bit deeper into which metrics you can capture from your website and presented them to your business side as an argument for investing in faster websites. Find out which metric you really need to optimize in order to “move the needle”Related Links:* Using machine learning to determine drivers of bounce and conversion - Velocity 2016***** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsqP16jnDs* WEBPAGETEST***** https://www.webpagetest.org/* WPO-Foundation Github

Adam Auerbach (@Bugman31) has helped Capital One transform their development and testing practices into the Digital Delivery Age. Practicing ATDD and DevOps allows them to deploy high quality software continuously. One of their challenges has been the rather slow performance testing stage in their pipeline. Breaking up performance test into smaller units, using Docker to allow development to run concurrency and scalability tests early on, and automating these tests into their pipeline are some of the actions they have taken to level-up their performance engineering practices. Listen to this podcast to learn about how Capital One pushes code through the pipeline, what they have already achieved in their transformation and where the road is heading.Related Links:* Hygea Delivery Pipeline Dashboard https://github.com/capitalone/Hygieia* Capital One Labs http://www.capitalonelabs.com/#welcome* Capital One DevExchange https://developer.capitalone.com/

Do you speak SQL? Do you know what an Execution Plan is? Are you aware that large amounts of unique queries will impact Database Server CPU and also efficiency of the Execution Plan and Data Cache? These are all learnings from this episode where Sonja Chevre (@SonjaChevre) and Harald Zeitlhofer (@HZeitlhofer) – both database experts at Dynatrace – pointed out database performance hotspots and optimizations that you many of us probably never heard about.Watch the Online Performance Clinic -Database Diagnostics Use Cases with Dynatracehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEXfqzE-WQM

Are you still exporting load testing reports into Excel compare different runs manually? Matt Eisengruber – Guardian at Dynatrace – walks us through the life-changing transformation story of one of his former clients who used to spend an entire business day analyzing LoadRunner results.Through automation, they managed to get her the results when she walks into the office in the morning – giving her more time to do “real” business analyst work instead of doing manual number crunching. Matt shares some insights into what exactly it is they did to automate Dynatrace Load Test comparison, how they created the reports and which metrics they ended up looking at.

Alois Reitbauer (@AloisReitbauer) guest hosts - Mike Jones ( http://bit.ly/mjlnk ) takes us on a journey how the team moved a monolithic application that was built by a remote team to a micro service architecture. Learn how the manage a couple of million lines of code with only 5 people while improving performance and availability. Mike also shares lessons learned on their journey and shares strategies on how to make the transition to micro services while having to keep the lights on for day-to-day business.

Scott Stocker (@sestocker), Solution Architect at Perficient, tells us the background of a recent load testing engagement on an ASP.NET App running on SiteCore. Turns out that even these apps on the popular Microsoft platform suffer from the same architectural and implementation patterns as we see everywhere else. Bypassing the caching layer through FastQuery resulted in excessive SQL, which caused the system to not scale, but crumble. Scott tells us how they identified this issue and what his approach as an architect is to proactively identify most common performance and scalability problems.

The initial idea of the Cloud has long become commodity – which is IaaS. Containers are the current hype but still require you to take care of correctly configuring your container that will run your code. Mike Villiger (@mikevilliger) – a veteran and active member of the cloud community – explains why it is really PaaS that should be on top of your list. And why monitoring performance, architecture and resource consumption is more important than ever in order for your PaaS Adventure not to fail.Related article:http://www.it20.info/2016/03/the-incestuous-relations-among-containers-orchestration-tools/

In Part II, Richard Dominguez, Developer in Operations at PrepSportswear, is explaining the significance of understanding and dealing with bot and spider traffic on their eCommerce site. He explains why they route search bot traffic to dedicated servers, how to better serve good bots and how to block the bad ones. Most importantly: we learn about a lot of metrics he is providing for the DevOps but also the marketing teams to run a better online experience!