PurePerformance

DORA - the EU's Digital Operational Resiliency Act - will take effect in January of 2025 and is currently top of mind for IT Leaders across all financial service institutions that operate in the European Union. But what is DORA really? Why is this important? How can institutions meet the DORA requirements? What is the role of observability, automation and AI in all of this?
To answer all those and more questions we invited Kay Young, Sr Principal Product Manager at Dynatrace, who has been working with organizations around the globe that have been tasked to implement regulations such as DORA, GDPR, FedRAMP or others.
In our conversation we also touch base on the third-party risk management as well as resiliency testing and incident reporting.

Resources we discussed:
Kay's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlien-young-4a156730/
What is DORA blog: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/what-is-dora/
Taming DORA compliance: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/taming-dora-compliance-with-ai-observability-and-security/
Blog on Dynatrace's DORA compliance journey: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/the-dynatrace-journey-toward-dora-compliance/
Beyond DORA compliance: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/dora-how-dynatrace-helps-the-financial-sector-stay-resilient/

NAIS (pronounced like NICE) is a team central application platform that provides DevOps teams with the tools they need build, test, deploy, run and observe applications.
In this episode Hans Kristian Flaatten, Platform Engineer at NAV, walks us through the WHYs, HOWs and challenges of building modern platforms on Kubernetes. Tune in and hear WHY they defined their own abstraction layer for applications, HOW developers benefit from that platform and WHY they developed their developer portal instead of going with other popular available choices.

Links we discussed:
Hans Kristian's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansflaatten/
NAIS Documentation: https://docs.nais.io/

"We will overwhelm developers if we give them the same specialized observability, security or deployment tools that are used by their platform engineering, operations, SREs or security teams!" - says Viktor Farcic, Developer Advocate at UpBound and host of The DevOps Toolkit YouTube channel. 
Tune in and hear us discuss about making observability easier accessible for developers, what Viktor doesn't like about Kubernetes and how Crossplane - the cloud native control plane framework - can be the gateway to real product-oriented platform engineering!
Here the links we discussed during this episode:

• Viktor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viktorfarcic/
• DevOps Toolkit: https://www.youtube.com/@DevOpsToolkit
• Crossplane: https://www.crossplane.io/

Hans Kristian is a Platform Engineer for NAV's Kubernetes Platform Nais hosting Norway's wellfare services. With 10 years on Kubernetes, 2000 apps and 1000 developers across more than 100 teams there was a need to make OpenTelemetry adoption as easy as possible.Tune in as we hear from Hans Kristian who is also a CNCF Ambassador and hosts Cloud Native Day Bergen why OpenTelemetry is chosen by the public sector, why it took much longer to adopt, which challenges they had to scale the observability backend and how they are tackling the "noisy data problem"
Links we discussed in the episode

• Follow Hans Kristian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansflaatten/
• From 0 to 100 OTel Blog: https://nais.io/blog/posts/otel-from-0-to-100/?foo=bar
• Cloud Native Day Bergen: https://2024.cloudnativebergen.dev/
• Public Money, Public Code. How we open source everything we do! (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4v05Huy2mlw&pp=ygUkT3BlbiBzb3VyY2Ugb3BlbiBnb3Zlcm5tZW50IGZsYWF0dGVu)
• State of Platform Engineering in Norway (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3WFZhETlS9s&pp=ygUYc3RhdGUgb2YgcGxhdGZvcm0gbm9yd2F5)

Has one of the decision makers in your organization decided that you have to go "all in on technology X" because they saw a great presentation at a conference or got a great sales pitch from a vendor? If that is the case then this episode is for you and you should forward it to those decision makers.
Sebastian Vietz, Director of Reliability Engineering and Host of the Reliability Enablers Podcast, shares his thoughts on considerations when picking a technology like Serverless. We discuss the importance of knowing limits, best fit architectural patterns and things that should influence your technology decisions!
Being aware of coldstarts, a 20000 concurrent request limit or 512mb being an ideal size for Lambda are just some of the things we can all learn from Sebastian.

Additional links we discussed:
Sebastians LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianvietz/
Reliability Podcast: https://podnews.net/podcast/ibe8k
More things on serverless: https://serverlessland.com/

When your code runs on more than 6 million systems - many of them business critical - then this is really exciting news for Marco and Wolfgang, Dynatrace OneAgent Java Team members. Their code powers auto-instrumentation and collection of all observability signals of Java based applications running on every possible stack: container in k8s, serverless, VM, on your workstation or even the mainframe.
Tune is as we sat down with Marco and Wolfgang to learn what it means to continuously innovate on agent-based instrumentation with 160+ other engineers across the globe that also focus on OneAgent. They share insights on how they develop their observability code, how they continuously test across all supported environments, what the processes at Dynatrace look like to avoid situations like the recent CrowdStrike outage and how they integrate and collaborate with other communities and tools such as OpenTelemetry!

Things we discussed during the episode
Dynatrace OneAgent: https://www.dynatrace.com/platform/oneagent/
Dynatrace for Java: https://www.dynatrace.com/technologies/java-monitoring/
OpenTelemetry and Dynatrace: https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/extend-dynatrace/opentelemetry
Jobs at Dynatrace: https://careers.dynatrace.com/

When thousands of systems show a blue screen - which ones do you fix first to quickly bring up your most critical systems? For that you need to know which systems are impacted, which mission critical applications run on it, and which depending systems are also impacted by something like the recent CrowdStrike incident!
We have invited Josh Wood, Principal Solutions Engineer at Dynatrace, who was one of the first responders helping organizations to leverage observability data to identify which systems to fix first to bring critical apps such as ATMs, Self-Service Terminals, POS (Point of Sales), ... back up again quickly.
In this special episode Josh is walking us through the technical details of the CrowdStrike BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), what caused it, how to leverage observability to get a priorities list of systems to fix first and what organizations can do to prevent software impacting issues in the future.

Here the links we discussed in the episode:
Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadwood/
Josh's blog on CrowdStrike BSOD: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/crowdstrike-bsod-quickly-find-machines-impacted-by-the-crowdstrike-issue/
CrowdStrike Incident Takeaway Blog: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/crowdstrike-incident-revisiting-vendor-quality-control/ 

WebAssembly runs in every browser, provides secure and fast code execution from any language, runs across multiple platforms and has a very small binary footprint. It's adopted by several of the big web-based SaaS solutions we use on a daily basis. 
But where did WebAssembly come from? What problems does it try to solve? Has it reached critical adoption? And how about observing code that gets executed in browsers, servers or embedded devices?
To answer all those questions we invited Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon, who explains the history, current implementation status, limitations and opportunities that WebAssembly provides.

Further links we disucssed
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbutcher/
Fermyon Dev Website: https://developer.fermyon.com/ 
The New Stack Blog with Matt: https://thenewstack.io/webassembly-and-kubernetes-go-better-together-matt-butcher/ 

"Because I don't want software to go down every single day in my next gig!" is what drives the motivation of Ash Patel, Reliability Advocate and Podcast host of SREpath, to talk about and educate IT professionals on the importance of building and operating reliable systems.
For 15 years Ash used to be Director of Operations at a private health service organization. He has experienced that patients couldn't get the treatment they expected due to unreliable software he was responsible for. 
In our conversation Ash talks about how he had to close the knowledge gap on technology but also solve the problem by having engineers understand the pain and the requirements of their end users. One way to educate more engineers is through his podcast called SREpath where Observability has become a hot topic recently. Tune in, hear about the memorable stories from his guests from CapitalOne, IKEA and SquaredUp, and lets move towards a world where software is reliable by default.

Links as discussed today:
Ash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ash-patel-srepath/
SREpath Podcast: https://www.srepath.com/podcast/
Clearing Delusions in Observability https://read.srepath.com/p/30-clearing-delusions-in-observability-2af 
Boosting your observability data's usability https://read.srepath.com/p/35-boosting-your-observability-datas-3f4 
How to Enable Observability for Success https://read.srepath.com/p/40-how-to-enable-observability-for

"Meet your users where they are!" - For Platform Engineering Teams that means understanding the current way your engineers work, understand their pain, and provide a solution that doesnt force them to change their behavior but provides a 10x efficiency improvement. Thats not easy to achieve but is what we discussed with Abby Bangser in our latest episode
Abby is a Team Topologies Advocate, has spent years at Thoughtworks helping organizations transform through Delivery Platforms and is now a Lead at the CNCF Platform Working Group. Tune in and hear our discussions on Why Platform Engineering is nothing new, how to avoid Platform Engineering Teams to become your next bottleneck and silo, why Platforms need to have more than one interface and why the purpose of Platform Engineering should be to bring good Developer Experience to all engineers

Here all the links we discussed during this episode
Platform Engineering Maturity Model: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platform-eng-maturity-model/
CNCF Platform Working Group: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/wgs/platforms/
KubeCon 2024 Talk: https://colocatedeventseu2024.sched.com/event/1YFdf/sometimes-lipstick-is-exactly-what-a-pig-needs-abby-bangser-syntasso-whitney-lee-vmware
GitHub Issue for Questionnaire: https://github.com/cncf/tag-app-delivery/issues/635
Kratix: https://www.kratix.io/
Abbys LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbybangser/
Abbys Events: https://www.paintedwavelimited.com/events