PurePerformance

Azure DevOps, formerly known as VSTS, is more than just a set of tools. But what is it exactly? How does it help enterprises to deploy better code faster? Does it only work for Azure or other platforms & clouds as well? How can it be extended or integrated into existing processes and tools?

Abel Wang, Sr Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, is giving us a tour through Azure DevOps and how he has seen it implemented and integrated into existing enterprise DevOps tool landscapes. We briefly discussed the Unbreakable Delivery Pipeline for Azure DevOps that Abel helped implement and is now available on the Visual Studio Marketplace. So – give it a try and see for yourself what Abel and team has built!

Last but not least we also touched upon Azure DevOps for databases and how you to implement regression testing, continuous deployment and canary releases for database updates. Very intriguing topic that we are sure to cover in future sessions in more detail.

https://abelsquidhead.com/index.php/2018/08/03/the-dynatrace-unbreakable-pipeline-in-vsts-and-azure-bam/

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Safiahabib.DynatraceUnbreakablePipeline

https://twitter.com/AbelSquidHead?lang=en

Happy Guy Fawkes Night!

In the first episode with Ben Rushlo, Vice President of Dynatrace Services, we learned about things like not getting fooled by Bot traffic, which metrics to monitor and how RUM can replace your traditional site analytics.

In this episode we dive deeper into RUM use cases around user behavior analytics, bridging the silos between Dev, Ops & Business and elaborate on why blindly optimizing individual page load times is most likely wasted time as you won’t impact what really matters: End-to-End User Experience!

In our discussion we also talked about UX vs UI as well as importance of Accessibility. Here two links we want you to look at: Holger Weissboeck on Let’s put U in UX and Stephanie Mcilroy’s presentation at DevOne.

Listen to Episode 70:
https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/070-exploring-real-user-monitoring-with-

Let's Put the U in UX:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi19hls9LfY

Stephanie Mcilroy’s presentation at DevOne:
https://devone.us/speakers/#stephaniemcilroy

Data vs. Info article Brian mentioned:
https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/monitoring-in-the-time-of-cloud-native-c87c7a5bfa3e

Did you know that Azure Service Fabric is used by most of Microsoft’s global high scale services such as Bing, Dynamics or Xbox)? It’s a battle tested distributed systems platform that enables developers to deploy, manage and scale their microservices. In this session we have Sravan Rengarajan, Program Manager at Microsoft Azure, giving us an overview of the key use cases, how Service Fabric started and in which direction it is heading. We also learn how you get your own free local version of Service Fabric and why Service Fabric gets us towards real Serverless computing. Additional information can be found on the Service Fabric GitHub codebase – yeah – its all out there on GitHub!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sravan-rengarajan/ - Sravan on Linkedin
http://aka.ms/servicefabricdocs - learn more about Service Fabric
http://aka.ms/servicefabricmesh - learn more about Mesh
http://aka.ms/tryservicefabric - free clusters to party on!
https://github.com/microsoft/service-fabric - GitHub codebase

Minecraft – the hugely popular sandbox video game – might not be your traditional software to monitor with an APM (Application Performance Management) tool. But Mike Villiger did it anyway in order to learn some advanced concepts in application monitoring such as custom entry points, thread diagnostics, method hotspots or simply to figure out why his mod’ed Minecraft sometimes couldn’t keep up with processing all the changes and skipped cycles. By using Dynatrace – first AppMon now Dynatrace SaaS – he learned more about the internals of Minecraft, how the single threaded architecture calls each mod and why a single mod must not take longer than 50ms to process. Mike gives us insights into which problems he found within Minecraft but more importantly what he takes away for his daily job as a performance advocate and evangelist. If you have any interesting side projects where you use APM tools let us know – there is always something to learn from every project!

https://minecraft.net/
https://twitter.com/mikevilliger

Brett Hofer is giving us his inside story on how he was called for the rescue to break a monolithic healthcare system that, after 3 years of development, was on the verge of having a major business impact on the largest healthcare vendor in the US. We learn about his strategic decisions such as quieting the system, establish traceability and most importantly: setting up a separate team that broke the monolithic while keeping it in sync with the main branch development. Brett Hofer is now Global Practice Lead at Dynatrace where he and his team help Dynatrace customers successfully walking through their digital transformations.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-hofer-2432572/

Ben Rushlo, Vice President of Dynatrace Services, specializes in the Digital Experience. In this episode, Ben talks to us about Real User Monitoring. What happens when good bots go bad? Can Real User Monitoring (RUM) replace your traditional site analytics? If you have RUM, is there any reason to also use synthetics? What performance metrics are the best when it comes to monitoring the end user? How does RUM help you understand the performance of business? Tune in to episode 70 of PurePerformance for answers to these questions.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrushlo/

Serverless has been a hot topic for quite a while, but we are still in the early stages when it comes to best practices and tooling. Justin Donohoo, Co-Founder of observian.com, gives us the pros and cons of 4 architectural patterns that he calls: “Microservice / nano pattern”, “Service Pattern”, “Monolithic Pattern” and the “GraphQL Patterns”. Besides these patterns we also learn about common cost traps and how to “architecture around them”. For more information on serverless Justin also shared his recent Serverless Meetup presentation. And stay tuned – there will be more from Justin around secrets, containers and anything else there is to know about cloud native applications.

* https://twitter.com/justindonohoo
* https://www.observian.com/
* https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ffx9wWioFahxQJbhpPhJ3FC-csNXrdEGdufrj5LwV6w/edit#slide=id.p
* https://observian.com/tools/secret-awsome/
* https://www.puresec.io/blog

In our previous episode with Chris Burrell, Head of Technology at Landbay, we learned how they got rid of end-to-end testing in order to speed up continuous delivery. Today we discuss how they still make sure that no code changes in their microservice architecture breaks end-to-end use cases by leveraging Contract-based Testing using Swagger and several tools in the Swagger ecosystem, e.g: diff, code generation … - also make sure to check out Chris’ presentation at yCon called “CDC is dead – long live swagger”.

* https://twitter.com/ChrisBurrell7
* https://swagger.io/
* https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-codegen/tree/master/modules/swagger-codegen/src/main/resources
* http://uk.droidcon.com/skillscasts/11147-lightning-talk-cdc-testing-is-dead-long-live-swagger

How can you get your build times down to minutes? Exactly: eliminate the largest time consumer! At Landbay, where Chris Burrell heads up technology, this was end-to-end testing.

Landbay deploys their 40 different microservices into ECS on a continuous basis. The fastest deployment from code to production is 6 minutes. This includes a lot of testing – but simply not the traditional end-to-end testing any longer. Chris gives us insights in contract testing, mocked frontend testing, how they do Blue/Green deployments and what their strategy is when it comes to rollback or rollforward.

For more information watch Chris’s talk on 6 minutes from Code Commit to Live at µCon and his lightening talk on CDC Testing is Dead – Long Live Swagger.

https://twitter.com/ChrisBurrell7
https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/10714-6-minutes-from-code-commit-to-live-you-won-t-believe-how-we-did-it
https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/11147-lightning-talk-cdc-testing-is-dead-long-live-swagger#video

Have you heard about Load Shedding? If not then dive into this discussion with Acacio Cruz, Engineering Director at Google ( https://twitter.com/acaciocruz ). He walks us through what Google learnt from one of the early outages at Gmail and how he and his team are now applying concepts such as load shedding to avoid disruption of their services despite spikes of load or unpredictable requests. We also discuss SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), how it started and transformed at Google and how we should think about automation, configuration of automation, and automation of automation. For more details – including visuals – we encourage you to watch Acacio’s breakout session from devone.at on YouTube (Load Shedding at Google).

https://devone.at/speakers/#acaciocruz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNEIkivvaV4