PurePerformance PurePerformance

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, Cillium, Falco, Tetragon, Inspector Gadget ... or whether you are developing your own eBPF programs!
Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, 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/ 

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

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 Dana Harrison, 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

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 Roberth Strand, 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 What is GitOps Really!
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/

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 Christian Hernandez, Head of Community at Akuity, 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 ArgoCD, Kargo as well as OpenGitOps 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/

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 Jessielaine (Jelly) Punongbayan, 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 Open Mainframe or Zowe 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/