Use Things you Understand! Learn the fundamentals to understand the layers of abstraction! And remember that we don't live in a world with unlimited resources!
These are advice from our recent conversation with Ernst Ambichl, Chief Product Architect at Dynatrace, who has started his performance career in the late 80s building the first load testing tools for databases which later became one of the most successful performance engineering tools in the market.
Tune in and learn about how Ernst has evolved from being a performance engineer to become an advocate for "Designing and Architecting for Performance". Ernst explains how important good upfront analysis of performance requirements and characteristics of the underlying infrastructure is, how to define baselines and constantly evaluate your changes against your goals.
On a personal note: I want to say THANK YOU Ernst for being one of my personal mentors over the past 20+ years. You inspired me with your passion about performance and building resilient systems

SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) have varying roles across different organizations: From Codifying your Infrastructure, handling high priority incidents, automating resiliency, ensuring proper observability, defining SLOs or getting rid of alert fatigue. What an SRE team must not be is a SWAT team - or - as Dana Harrison, Staff SRE at Telus puts it: "You don't want to be the fire brigade along the DevOps Infinity Loop"
In his years of experience as an SRE Dana also used to run 1 week boot camps for developers to educate them on making apps observable, proper logging, resiliency architecture patterns, defining good SLIs & SLOs. He talked about the 3 things that are the foundation of a good SRE: understand the app, understand the current state and make sure you know when your systems are down before your customers tell you so!

If you are interested in seeing Dana and his colleagues from Telus talk about their observability and SRE journey then check out the On-Demand session from Dynatrace Perform 2024: https://www.dynatrace.com/perform/on-demand/perform-2024/?session=simplifying-observability-automations-and-insights-with-dynatrace#sessions

Whether its GitOps, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Observability as a Service or other terms. We all have our definitions, but rarely do we have a consensus on what those terms really mean! To get some clarity we invited Roberth Strand, CNCF Ambassador and Azure MVP, who has been passionately advocating for GitOps as it was initially defined and explained by Alexis Richardson, Weaveworks in his blog What is GitOps Really!
Tune in and learn about Desired State Management, Continuous Pull vs Pushing from Pipelines, how Progressive Delivery or Auto-Scaling fits into declaring everything in Git, what OpenGItOps is and why this podcast will help you get your GitOps certification (coming soon)
As we had a lot to talk we also touched on Platform Engineering and various other topics

Here are all the links we discussed:
Alexis GitOps Blog Post: https://medium.com/weaveworks/what-is-gitops-really-e77329f23416
OpenGitOps: https://opengitops.dev/
Flux Image Reflector: https://fluxcd.io/flux/components/image/
CNCF White Paper on Platform Engineering: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platforms/
Platform Engineering Maturity Model: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platform-eng-maturity-model/
Platform Engineering Working Group as part of TAG App Delivery: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/wgs/platforms/

Can you explain GitOps in simple terms? How does it fit into Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment? And what are considerations when rolling out GitOps in an enterprise?
To get answers to those questions we sat down with Christian Hernandez, Head of Community at Akuity, who has a fabulous analogy to explain GitOps that I am sure many of us will "borrow" from him. Christian also explains the ecosystem he works in such as ArgoCD, Kargo as well as OpenGitOps which aims to provide open-source standard and best practices to implementing GitOps.
We closed the session with some advice around Application Dependency Management, External Secrets Operator and choosing the right Git Repo Structure.

Here are some of the links we discussed:
OpenGitOps: https://opengitops.dev/
ArgoCD: https://argoproj.github.io/cd/
Kargo: https://github.com/akuity/kargo
ArgoCon: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/co-located-events/argocon/
GitOpsCon: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/gitopscon-north-america/

While the mainframe is powering the world's most critical system the words "modern", "open source" or "generative AI" typically don't come to mind. So lets change this!
To do that simply tune in to our latest episode where we have Jessielaine (Jelly) Punongbayan, Sr. Technical Support Engineer at Dynatrace, telling us why she is excited about the modern Mainframe and how it brought her from the Philippines via Singapore and Czech Republic to Austria.

We learn about all the open-source projects and communities she is involved in such as Open Mainframe or Zowe that make it easy to connect the Mainframe with the modern tooling of today's development environments. Jelly shares her stories about the role of good observability, how it connects the distributed and the mainframe world and how it enables development teams to build more efficient systems. And what about AI? Well - you have to tune in and listen to the end!

Here the links discussed in the episode
Writing a COBOL program using VSCode: https://medium.com/modern-mainframe/beginners-guide-cobol-made-easy-introduction-ecf2f611ac76
Using CircleCI to perform automation in Mainframe: https://medium.com/modern-mainframe/beginners-guide-cobol-made-easy-leveraging-open-source-tools-eb4f8dcd7a98
Using OpenTelemetry to capture Mainframe Insights: https://medium.com/@jessielaine.punongbayan/re-imagining-mainframe-insights-through-open-source-tooling-79dd4c937114
Dynatrace support for Mainframe: https://www.dynatrace.com/technologies/mainframe-monitoring/

201 is the HTTP status code for Resource Created. It is also the number of PurePerformance Episodes (including this one) we have published over the past years. None better to invite than the person who initially inspired us to launch PurePerformance: Mark Tomlinson, Performacologist and Director of Observability at FreedomPay
Tune in and listen to our thoughts on current state of automation, a recap on IFTTT, whether we believe that AIs such as CoPilot will not only make us more efficient in creating code and scripts but also lead to new ways of automation. We also give a heads-up (or rather a recap) of what Mark will be presenting on at Perform 2024.

To learn more about and from Mark follow him on the various social media channels:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtomlins/
Performacology: https://performacology.com/

Marcelo Amaral is a Researcher for Cloud System Optimization and Sustainability. With his background in performance engineering where he optimized microservice workloads in containerized environments making the leap towards analyzing and optimizing energy consumption was easy.
Tune in to this episode and learn about how Kepler, the CNCF project Marcelo is working on, which provides metrics for workload energy consumption based on power models it was trained on by the community. Marcelo goes into details about how Kepler works and also provides practical advice for any developer to keep energy consumption in mind when making architectural and coding decisions.

To learn more about Kepler and the episode today check out:
LinkedIn from Marcelo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcamaral/
CNCF Blogpost on Kepler: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/10/11/exploring-keplers-potentials-unveiling-cloud-application-power-consumption/
Kepler GitHub Repo: https://github.com/sustainable-computing-io/kepler

Its only been a year since ChatGPT was introduced. Since then we see LLMs (Large Language Models) and Generative AIs being integrated into every days life software applications. Developers have the hard choice to pick the right model for their use case to produce the quality of output their end users demand.
Tune in to this session where we have Nir Gazit, CEO and Co-founder of Traceloop, educating us about how to observe and quantify the quality of LLMs. Besides performance and costs engineers need to look into quality attributes such as accuracy, readability or grammatical correctness.
Nir introduces us to OpenLLMetry - a set of Open Source extensions built on top of OpenTelemetry providing automated observability into the usage of LLMs for developers to better understand how to optimize the usage of LLMs. His advice to every developer is to start measuring the quality of your LLMs on Day 1 and continuously evaluate as you change your model, the prompt and the way you interact with your LLM stack!

If you have more questions about LLM Observability check out the following links:
OpenLLMetry GitHub Page: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry
Traceloop Website: https://www.traceloop.com/
OpenLLMetry Documentation: https://traceloop.com/docs/openllmetry

After analyzing Distributed Traces over more than 15 years Brian and I thought that everyone in software engineering and operations must be satisfied with all that observability data we have available. But. Maybe Brian and I were wrong because we didn’t fully understand all the use cases - especially those for developers that must fix code in production or need to quickly understand what code from somebody else is really doing without having the luxury to add another log line and redeploy on the fly. To learn more about the observability requirements of developers we invited Liran Haimovitch, CTO at Rookout and now part of Dynatrace, who has spent the last 7 years solving the challenging problems that developers face day and night. Tune in and learn about what non-breaking breakpoints are, how it is possible to "debug in production" without impacting running code and how we can make developers lives easier even though we push so many things "to the left"

I was invited to speak at BankTechShow in Budapest, Hungary where the nations IT leaders in the banking sector presented and discussed the future of banking - both in the cloud as well as what it means for the physical bank branches.
I got a chance to sit down with Adam Gajdi, IT Solutions CoE Lead at K&H, who walked me through the process of their recent new mobile banking app launch. Adam highlighted the importance of observability for both business owners as well as developers. Furthermore, Adam enlightened me with the fact that Hungarian banks are mandated to conduct chaos tests to proof that their systems are resilient in case of data center outages. I was obviously also curious about how AI, LLMs and other technologies are adopted in their sector. Tune in to learn more

Besides attending KubeCon 2023 NA Andreas (Andi) Grabner, co-host of PurePerformance but guest today, has also travelled parts of the US to chat with the broader observablity community on topics such as Platform Engineering, Observability, DevOps, Automation & Security.
Tune in and get a quick recap of all the topics Andi has picked up on his recent trip