Pureperformance

Only a few can claim they have successfully created a Pure-Serverless architecture and only those really understand the challenges of observing real event driven architectures. Apostolis Apostolidis (also known as Toli) is one of those people and its why we invited him back to discuss all the lessons learned from his time as Head of Engineering Practices at cinch. Tune in and learn about the evoluation of Serverless observability and the challenges when observing API Gateways, Queues and Step Functions. Listen to Toli's advice on picking one observability vendor, doing your own custom instrumentation and making yourself familiar with the observability data from your managed service provider.Also go back to our previous episode to hear more from his Engineering Practices for Success and remember that the time to ask about coldstarts is over

Codifying Golden Paths that ideally don't need you to build a K8s Operator! This is what Practical Platform Engineering should look like!In our latest episode we learn from Maurico (Salaboy) Salatino who has been contributing to open source for the past 12 years. Tune in and learn from his journey of designing and built platforms. He shares his opinion on the Platform Engineering skillsets, how to design for self-service, how to pick the right tools out of the 160+ CNCF project options and shares some of his favorite tools (including Crossplane, VCluster, Argo, OpenFeature, Keptn ...) that should be part of a modern cloud native platform.Links discussed in this podcast:Salaboy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/salaboySalaboy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salaboy/Upcoming Book: https://www.salaboy.com/book/Cloud-Native Snapshots: https://www.salaboy.com/cloud-native-snapshots/Diagrid: https://www.diagrid.io/

Reducing the cognitive load by simplifying computing for every developer in an organization! One of the many definitions of Platform Engineering. But what is Platform Engineering for real? Just a new hype? What problem does it really solve? How does it link with DevOps and SRE? Are there any standards or reference architectures available?To get a new perspective on Platform Engineering we invited Saim Safdar, CNCF Ambassador and member of the CNCF TAG App Delivery Platform Working Group. Tune in and learn about the Platform Maturity Model, how to get involved to shape the field of Platform Engineering, what other people that Saim has interviewed are good to follow and much more ..Here the links we discussed:CNCF Platforms White Paper: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platformsMaturity Model Working Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bP8-LQ-d41eIdQB3IC2YsncDhawpFLggql2JxwtE0XI/editPlatform Working Group: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/about/wg-platforms/Cloud Native Podcast with Alexis

Are you frustrated with your team's ability to troubleshoot issues in production despite their proficiency in pushing out new builds? The root of this problem may lie in the absence of Observability Driven Development. In our latest episode we are joined by Apostolis Apostolidis (also known as Toli) who - as Head of Engineering Practices at cinch - has spent his past years enabling teams to adopt the easiest path to value. He is passionate about DevOps and has a strong opinion on how to educate engineers on "Consciously Instrumenting Code for good Observability".Tune in learn more about good engineering practices, building internal communities of practice, the benefits of traces over metrics and logs and why we need to start adding observability to our CVs and LinkedIn profiles.Here are all relevant links we discussed in this episodeTolis Website: https://www.toli.io/Tolis LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apostolosapostolidis/Toli on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apostolis09/WTFisSRE Talk on DevOp

Do you know why customers spend more money at a pub when ordering at a table vs ordering directly from at the bar tender? Do you want to know how to get SaaS vendors to send you their observability & telemetry data? Do you want to know the career path of how an Infrastructure Analyst turned Digitial Readiness Manager?Tune in to this PurePerformance episode where we sat down with Mark Forrester from Mitchell & Butlers answering all these questions and also drawing the parallels to Observability. Because observability has come a long way just as Mark: From traditional infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Network) to APM (Service Response Time & Failure Rates), to Real User Behaviour and now End-2-End Business Processes Analytics. Unlocking the potential of Digitial Business Observability lets Mark optimize the end-2-end customer journey to make sure their customers always feel like they are taken care of when trying to order online food delivery, a meal or a drink at a restaurant. As you learn, digital busi

As far as we know - besides Kubernetes there is only Prometheus that belongs to the prestigious group of open-source projects that have their own documentary. Now why is that? Prometheus has emerged as the go-to solution for capturing metrics in modern software stacks, earning its status as the de facto standard. With its widespread adoption and a constantly expanding ecosystem of companion tools, Prometheus has become a pivotal component in the software development landscape.Join us as we sit down with Björn Rabenstein, an accomplished engineer at Grafana, who has dedicated nearly a decade to actively contributing to the Prometheus project. Björn takes us on a journey through the project's early days, unravels the reasons behind its meteoric rise, and provides us with insightful technical details, including his personal affinity for Histograms.Here are the links we discussed during the podcast for you to follow up:Prometheus Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT4fJNbfe14First Prometheus talk at SRE

APIs are powering and empowering software innovation as they enable new use cases on top of existing services. Observability into API usage to answer questions like: how APIs are called, what APIs do, where APIs fail, where APIs are slow, where APIs are misused … has to be on top of mind for architects that decide to build or use APIs.In this episode we welcome Sonja Chevre, Group Product Manager at Tyk, who recently gave a captivating talk at KubeCon about using OpenTelemetry to get insights into popular API frameworks such as GraphQL. We are discussing common challenges for SREs such as that APIs often hide the status of a call behind an HTTP 200 or that debugging individual calls is really hard as details of the call are not exposed by default to telemetry data. We also cover topics such as API-led growth, API as a product as well as open standards such as OpenTelemetry and OpenAPI. Here the list of discussed links during the show:KubeCon Talk: https://kccnceu2023.sched.com/event/1HyVc/what-could-go-wrong-

Security comes with a price tag, such as additional wait time when going through checks at the airport or when inspection network packages at your firewall.To learn about current approaches to cyber defense and cyber deception we invited back Stefan Achleitner, Lead Researcher Cloud Native Security at Dynatrace. Tune in and learn why it is important to keep changing and using different passwords, why you should monitor all your servers, what zero day vulnerabilities are, the role of eBPF in security and why we have to minimize false positives alarms like the Hawaii Missile Alert! Some of the links we discussed during the podcast can be found here:Our previous episode: https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/don-t-look-away-from-the-next-cyber-secuHawaii false missile alert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alerteBPF on isitobservable: https://isitobservable.io/search?q=eBPFCheck if you've been compromised: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Stefan’s SolarWinds Article (German): https://in

36 million generated OpenTelemetry spans per hour for GraphQL based queries – that’s just one of the stats we discussed with Justin Scherer, Sr Developer and Consultant, who is leading OTel adoption and Shift-Left observability efforts at NWM. For Justin, OpenTelemetry helps commoditize data gathering in modern cloud native environments so that the backend observability platform of choice can focus on answering higher level business impacting questions.If you are about to roll out OpenTelemetry in your organization then take the advice from Justin such as: Bringing Business Leaders early into the discussion! Engage with the OpenTelemetry community! Understand what your Observability Platform already gives you and focus on the gaps! To learn more about OpenTelemetry check out some of the links we discussed during the podcast:OpenTelemetry Website: https://opentelemetry.io/IsItObservable: https://isitobservable.io/open-telemetryPodcast: https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/adopting-open-observability-a

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