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 🙂

Additional links we discussed today:
Previous Podcast with Toli: https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/unlocking-the-power-of-observability-eng
OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/
AWS Step Functions: https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/
Dynatrace Business Flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0bSzvQrUzA

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/salaboy
• Salaboy 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/platforms
Maturity Model Working Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bP8-LQ-d41eIdQB3IC2YsncDhawpFLggql2JxwtE0XI/edit
Platform Working Group: https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/about/wg-platforms/
Cloud Native Podcast with Alexis Richardson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6D-NYkVp9E
Patterns and Anti-Patterns: https://octopus.com/devops/platform-engineering/patterns-anti-patterns/
Saim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saim-safder/

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 episode
Tolis Website: https://www.toli.io/
Tolis LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apostolosapostolidis/
Toli on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apostolis09/
WTFisSRE Talk on DevOps Meets Service Delivery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLrx0BCMl0Y
GOTO talk on EDA in Practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM-dTroS0FA

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 business observability goes beyond your own digital premise and needs to tap into the data of your 3rd party suppliers and SaaS vendors.

To see more from Mark also check out his interview at Dynatrace Perform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGpduOrPxpU

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=rT4fJNbfe14
• First Prometheus talk at SRECon 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFiEq3yYpI8
• The Zen of Prometheus: https://the-zen-of-prometheus.netlify.app/
• Talk from Observability Day KubeCon 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgINvIK9SYc
• Secret History of Prometheus Histograms: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/histograms/
• Prometheus Histograms: https://promcon.io/2019-munich/talks/prometheus-histograms-past-present-and-future/
• Native Histograms: https://promcon.io/2022-munich/talks/native-histograms-in-prometheus/
• PromQL for Histograms: https://promcon.io/2022-munich/talks/promql-for-native-histograms/

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-with-a-graphql-query-and-can-opentelemetry-help-sonja-chevre-ahmet-soormally-tyk-technologies
• API Management vs Gateway discussion: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sonjachevre_apimanagement-apigateway-apisecurity-activity-7061596404854521857-N_cO/
• API as a Product: https://tyk.io/blog/unlocking-the-potential-of-api-as-a-product/
• OpenAPI: https://www.openapis.org/
• OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/

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-secu
• Hawaii false missile alert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert
• eBPF on isitobservable: https://isitobservable.io/search?q=eBPF
• Check if you've been compromised: https://haveibeenpwned.com/
• Stefan’s SolarWinds Article (German): https://intelligente-welt.de/so-funktionierte-der-angriff-auf-solarwinds/
• Stefan's Problem wiht Passwords Article (German): https://intelligente-welt.de/passwort-manager-und-andere-loesungen-fuers-passwort-chaos/

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-telemetry
• Podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/user/pureperformance/adopting-open-observability-across-your-
• LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-scherer-198126160/

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-skyscanner
• Link to QCon talk (although I believe the video won't be made available till later in the year) https://qconlondon.com/presentation/mar2023/effective-and-efficient-observability-opentelemetry
• Recent InfoQ interview covering the talk: https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/03/effective-observability-otel/
• Video on a talk I did with Ted Young a couple years ago during our tracing migration to OpenTelemetry: https://youtu.be/HExcLWA2b8M
• Talk at o11yfest 2021 on our tracing migration to OTel: https://vi.to/hubs/o11yfest/videos/3143
• Mastodon: https://mas.to/@dan_gomezblanco