PurePerformance

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 folks

Also 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 Humanitec, 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-platform-engineering
Platform Engineering Community: https://platformengineering.org
PlatformCon: https://platformcon.com/
Platform Weekly: https://platformweekly.com/
Follow Luca on Twitter: https://twitter.com/luca_cloud
Connect with Luca on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-galante/

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 Practice
• Rivers of Opposites
• Varieties of Work
• Follow Matt on Twitter
• Connect 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=9wc34MozKok
• Hijack a Kubernetes Cluster Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/nmeisenzahl/containerconf-2022-hijack-kubernetes
• Hijack a Kubernetes Cluster GitHub Tutorial: https://github.com/nmeisenzahl/hijack-kubernetes
• Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicomeisenzahl/
• Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nmeisenzahl

If you want to hear more from Nico listen until the end and pick from one of the suggested topics

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 podcast

• Laura on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-nolan-bb7429/
• Laura on Twitter:https://twitter.com/lauralifts
• Incident Template talk @ SRECon: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon22emea/presentation/nolan-break
• What SRE could be talk @ SRECon: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon22emea/presentation/nolan-sre
• Howie Post-Incident Guide: https://www.jeli.io/howie/welcome
• My philosophy on Alerting article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/199PqyG3UsyXlwieHaqbGiWVa8eMWi8zzAn0YfcApr8Q/edit

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 LinkedIn
• FACTOR
• Podcast (German): Newsletter Marketing
• Podcast (German): Build - Measure - Learn

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://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbrookbank/

SRECon EMEA Slides:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/srecon22_slides_mcghee.pdf
DevOpsDays Boston 2022 Session Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__e7b25QOHc

Enterprise Roadmap to SRE Book:
https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/enterprise-roadmap-to-sre/