Performance Engineering Masterclass for Optimizing Distributed Systems: What to Expect

Editor’s Note: The live event has concluded, but you can now access the masterclass videos and certification exam on-demand. 

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READ HIGHLIGHTS

Performance engineering in distributed systems is a critical skill to master. Because while it’s one thing to get massive terabyte-to-petabyte scale systems up and running, it’s a whole other thing to make sure they are operating at peak efficiency. In fact, it’s usually more than just “one other thing.” Performance optimization of large distributed systems is usually a multivariate problem — combining aspects of underlying hardware, networking, tuning operating systems or finagling with layers of virtualization and application architectures.

Such a complex problem can’t be taught from just one perspective. So, for our upcoming Performance Engineering Masterclass, we’re bringing together three industry experts who want to pass along to you the insights they have learned over their careers. Attendees will benefit from their perspectives based on extensive production and systems testing experience.

During this free, online – and highly interactive – 3 hour masterclass, you will learn how to apply SLO-driven strategies to optimize observability – and ultimately performance – from the front-end to the back-end of your distributed systems. Our experts walk you through how to optimize distributed systems performance with SLO-driven strategies.  Specifically, we’ll cover how to measure and optimize performance for latency-sensitive distributed systems built using modern DevOps approaches with progressive delivery. At the end, you will have the opportunity to demonstrate what you learned and earn a certificate that shows your achievement.

You will learn best practices on how to:

• Optimize your team’s pipelines and processes for continuous performance
• Define, validate, and visualize SLOs across your distributed systems
• Diagnose and fix subpar distributed database performance using observability methods

Schedule

The Masterclass program runs for three hours, between 8:30 – 11:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time, June 21st, 2022. The platform will open at 8:00 AM and close at 12:00 PM (noon), so there will be time before and after the scheduled sessions for you to meet and mingle with your fellow attendees, plus to ask questions in our live staffed virtual lounges:

Agenda

The day’s learning will be centered around three main lessons:

Introduction to Modern Performance

The relentless drive to cloud-native distributed applications means no one can sit back and hope applications are always going to perform at their peak capabilities. Whether your applications are built on microservices and serverless architectures, you need to be able to observe and improve the performance of your always-on, real-time systems. We’ll kick off our masterclass by providing a grounding in current expectations of what performance engineering and load testing entail.

This session defines the modern challenges developers face, including continuous performance principles, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs). It will delineate best practices, and provide hands-on examples using Grafana k6, an open source modern load testing tool built on Go and JavaScript.

Efficient Automation with the Help of SRE Concepts

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are a key part of modern software engineering practices. They help quantify the quality of service provided to end users, and therefore maintaining them becomes important for modern DevOps approaches with progressive delivery.

SLOs have become a powerful tool allowing teams to manage the monitoring of the reliability of production systems and validate the test cycles automatically launched through various pipelines. We’ll walk you through how to measure, validate and visualize these SLOs using Prometheus, an open observability platform, to provide concrete examples.

Next, you will learn how to automate your deployment using Keptn, a cloud-native event-based life-cycle orchestration framework. Discover how it can be used for multi-stage delivery, remediation scenarios, and automating production tasks.

Observability Best Practices in Distributed Databases

In the final session, dive into distributed database observability, showing several real-world situations that may affect workload performance and how to diagnose them. Gaining proper visibility against your database is important in order to predict, analyze and observe patterns and critical problems that emerge. Managing scenarios such as unbounded concurrency, alerting, queueing, anti-entropy and typical database background activities are often a production-grade requirement for most mission critical platforms. However, simply having access to these metrics is not enough. DevOps, Database and Application professionals need a deeper understanding of them to know what to watch for.

To show how to put these principles into practice, this session uses the ScyllaDB NoSQL database and ScyllaDB Monitoring Stack built on open source Grafana, Grafana Loki, Alert Manager and Prometheus as an example of instrumentation, observability tools, and troubleshooting methodologies. Discover how to triage problems by priority and quickly gather live insights to troubleshoot application performance.

Your Instructors

A masterclass is distinguished by the experience of its instructors, and we are pleased to introduce our 3 amazing instructors:

Leandro Melendez Grafana k6	Leandro Melendez, also known by his nom de guerre “Señor Performo,” has decades of experience as a developer, DBA, and project manager. He has spent the past decade focusing on QA for performance and load testing. Now a developer advocate at Grafana k6, Leandro seeks to share his experiences with broader audiences, such as hosting the Spanish-language edition of the PerfBytes podcast. He will also be speaking at the upcoming P99 CONF in October 2022.
Henrik Rexed Dynatrace	Henrik Rexed is a cloud native advocate with a career of nearly two decades focusing specifically on performance engineering. As a Senior Staff Engineer at Dynatrace, he is a frequent speaker in conferences, webinars and podcasts. His current passion is the movement to the emerging Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) standard for OpenTelemetry. Henrik will also be a speaker at the upcoming P99 CONF in October 2022.
Felipe Cardeneti Mendes ScyllaDB	Felipe Cardeneti Mendes is a published author and solutions architect at ScyllaDB. Before ScyllaDB he spent nearly a decade as a systems administrator at one of the largest tech companies on the planet. He focuses on helping customers adapt their systems to meet the challenges of this next tech cycle, whether that means building low latency applications in Rust, or migrating or scaling their systems to the latest hardware, operating systems and cloud environments.

Achieve Certification

At the end of the prepared presentations, there will be an examination offered to all attendees. Those who complete the examination with a passing grade will be presented with a Certificate of Completion for the Masterclass.

Attendees who do not achieve a passing grade during the live event will have a chance to retake the examination at a later date to achieve their certification.

Sponsors

This Masterclass is brought to you for free through a joint collaboration of ScyllaDB, Grafana k6, and Dynatrace.

Access it Now

The world of cloud-native distributed applications, observability and performance optimization is changing in real time, so there is no better time than right now to commit to deepening your knowledge.

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