1 JUL 2024 · "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

17 JUN 2024 · "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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbybangser/ 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 https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/wgs/platforms/. 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 

3 JUN 2024 · Requesting more CPU for your database used to take 6 months of planning 20 years ago. Now it takes the execution of a Terraform script. What has stayed the same all those years is https://www.linkedin.com/in/almudenavivanco/'s passion for performance engineering to keep systems optimized. Ensuring that systems are available, scalable and resilient even during spike events such as the upcoming Euro Cup or any holiday specials. Tune in and hear from Almudena, who is currently working for SCRM Lidl, on how moving to the cloud gave new justification to performance engineering. She explains the importance of connecting business with service level objectives and gives insights on how Lidl makes sure to sell 50000 pieces of pork without breaking the cloud bank Here the additional links we discussed Slides from Barcelona Meetup: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h83V4gUyqAmIWeAAtKb4BcRvuJV-XirLk-9Xq077nbw Video from TestCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIP_G-YBy04 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/almudenavivanco/

20 MAY 2024 · Making observability available to everyone! This noble goal needs superhero powers in an IT world where there is so much chatter and confusion about what observability is, how to sell the value add besides a glorified troubleshooting tool and how OpenTelemetry will disrupt the landscape. In our latest episode we havehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rainerschuppe/, Observability Veteran (more than 20+ years in the space), who has worked for the majority of the observability vendors. He is sharing his observability expertise through workshops in his home town of Mallorca. Teaching organizations from basic to strategic observability implementations. Tune in and learn about the typical adoption and maturity path of observability within enterprises: from fixing a problem at hand, to justifying the cost to keep it until enabling companies to become information driven digital organizations! Also check out his OpenTelemetry journey in his blog post series Here are the links we discussed today: Observability Heroes Website: https://observability-heroes.com/ Observability Heroes Community: https://observability.mn.co/ Cloud Native Mallorca Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/cloud-native-mallorca/ OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ Rainer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rainerschuppe/

6 MAY 2024 · eBPF is a kernel technology enabling high-performance, low overhead tools for networking, security and observability. In simpler terms: eBPF makes the kernel programmable! Tune in to this episode whether you have never heard about eBPF, using eBPF based tools such as bcc, https://cilium.io/, https://falco.org/, https://tetragon.io/, https://www.inspektor-gadget.io/ ... or whether you are developing your own eBPF programs! https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizrice/, Chief Open Source Officer at https://isovalent.com/, kicks this episode off with a brief introduction of eBPF, explains how it works, which use cases it has enabled and why eBPF can truly give you super powers!  In our conversation we dive deeper into the performance aspects of eBPF: how and why tools like Cillium outperforms classical network load balancers, how performance engineers can use it and how the Kernel internally handles eBPF extecutions. We discussed a lot of follow up material - here are all the relevant links: Liz's slide deck on "Unleashing the kernel with eBPF": https://speakerdeck.com/lizrice/unleashing-the-kernel-with-ebpf eBPF Documentary on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOA Learning eBPF GitHub repo accompanying her book: https://github.com/lizrice/learning-ebpf  eBPF website: https://epbf.io/ Liz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizrice/ 

22 APR 2024 · 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

8 APR 2024 · 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-h-034ab524/, 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

25 MAR 2024 · 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthstrand/, 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 https://medium.com/weaveworks/what-is-gitops-really-e77329f23416! 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/

11 MAR 2024 · 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/chernandez1982/, Head of Community at https://akuity.io/, 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 https://argoproj.github.io/cd/, https://github.com/akuity/kargohttps://github.com/akuity/kargoas well as https://opengitops.dev/https://opengitops.dev/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/

26 FEB 2024 · 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessielaine-punongbayan-59320464/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessielaine-punongbayan-59320464/, 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 https://openmainframeproject.org/ or https://www.zowe.org/https://www.zowe.org/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/