Is Performance Part of the DevOps Toolchain?

Get ready to discover some of the most actionable DevOps techniques and tooling, including performance and reliability for some of the world's smartest engineers. Hey, I'm Joe Colantonio, host of the DevOps Toolchain podcast, and my goal is to help you create DevOps toolchain awesomeness. Hey, welcome to the first episode of the DevOps Toolchain Show. The podcast formerly known as the Test Guild, Performance in SRE Podcasts, where we explore the latest trends, tools and techniques in the world of DevOps. I'm your host, Joe, and today we have a special episode for you. As you may know, our podcast used to be called the Performance in SRE Podcast, but we decided to rebrand and refocus our content. And today I want to go over and discuss why performance testing is an integral part of DevOps and why we made this change. And if you've been a loyal listener, don't worry, we still have you covered. But before we dive into it, let's hear it from our awesome sponsor, SmartBear. This episode is brought to you by SmartBear. As businesses demand more and more from software, the jobs of development teams gets harder and harder. They're expected to deliver fast and flawlessly, but too often they're missing the vital context to connect each step of the process. That's how SmartBear helps. Wherever you are in the testing lifecycle, they have a tool to give you a new level of visibility and automation so you can unleash your development team's full awesomeness. They offer free trials for all the tools, no credit cards are required, and even back it up with a responsive, award winning support team. Show on your path to great software. Learn more@smartbear.com today.

As you all know, the world of software development is evolving rapidly. And DevOps has become the go to methodology for many organizations. And it's all about delivering high quality software quickly. And one of the key aspects of DevOps is continuous testing. So continuous testing encompasses various testing methods, including functional performance, security, and more. And these tests are essential to ensuring that the application we create are flawless and provide a great user experience. And that's precisely why we decided to rebrand our podcast. We've been talking a lot about performance testing and sre, and I think that's important. But we realize that it's all part of a bigger picture, the DevOps toolchain. But before we go further into this, let me ask you a question. When you hear the term DevOps toolchain, do you consider performance testing as part of it.

Actually asked this question as a survey to LinkedIn and I was actually surprised by the results.

65% of folks that voted. Over 200 people voted on this, 65% said no. So they don't think of performance testing when they hear the term DevOps toolchain. And I want to change that because I 100% disagree with the results of the poll. When it comes to performance testing, I think it plays a critical role in the DevOps process. We need to make sure our apps are scalable, reliable and robust before they're released into the market. Performance testing is a critical element in achieving those goals. When it comes to performance testing, I think it plays a critical role in the DevOps process. Obviously you need to make sure our applications are scalable, reliable and robust before the release into the market, and performance testing is a critical element in achieving those goals. Also, scalability, reliability and robustness are three key aspects that developers need to strive for when building applications. Performance testing helps to identify bottlenecks and other issues that could lead to poor user experience or even application downtime. It's going to cost your company time and more importantly money, which is going to affect the bottom line, which then can have a cascading chain of reactions that happens leading to layoffs and lost revenue and all kinds of bad things. And don't forget the importance of the continuous aspect of performance testing DevOps. By continually performance testing our applications, we're able to catch issues early in the development process and resolve them quickly. So shift and left Performance testing is key for modern software development, and the goal should be for our developers to make the most performant software possible. Not only does this lead to higher quality software, but also leads to faster time to market and ultimately happy customers. And that's what the DevOps tool chain is all about. Breaking down the barriers between development and operations, delivering higher quality performance software quickly and efficiently. Also, to be honest, it's been difficult to consistently get guests to talk on just performance topics or SRE topics, and this should really help us get back on our planned weekly release cycle. As you may have noticed, over the past two or three years it has been every week it's been kind of spotty and I apologize for that. But it's been really difficult to get guests. I think expanding the area of topics that we can cover within DevOps to include not just performance testing, which we're not going to forget about, we will be including performance testing, but other topics as well that I think is going to help you with your day to day job. I think it's really going to help us be more consistent and give you more value every week. And I'm already seeing this. It's going to help open up options to speak with more leaders that can help you. For example, I recently got something on LinkedIn that said, hey Joe, it's been years. How you been? I didn't know you also cover the DevOps space. If I had known, I would have contacted you much earlier. And I've gotten a lot of these types of messages on LinkedIn. I also have another podcast called the Test Guild Automation Podcast. We cover all things automation, testing, awesomeness, cover tools like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, which is great. That's been going on for nine years. And I used to have a security podcast. Once again, it was hard to get guests just for security, so I thought I would take the performance, the SRE and the security and merge them all into one. The DevOps toolchain show. So we have now two podcasts. Well, technically we have three podcasts. We have the Automation podcast. We have what is now called the DevOps Toolchain show, what will cover all things with DevOps, including security and performance and server liability. And I also have a DevOps automation and DevOps news show that I do. It's a 10 minute show. It's a weekly new show. If you haven't listened to that, definitely check that out in the show notes as well. But on this show you can expect to hear more discussions about the various tools and techniques involved in the DevOps process and how they all work together to help teams deliver top notch applications. For example, it might make sense to go over what is the DevOps toolchain, its various stages, and the tools that can help you streamline your software development process to better understand all the different topics we now can cover on this show. So when I talk about the DevOps toolchain, what I'm referring to, what I'm thinking about is a set of combination of tools that aid in the delivery, the development and management of software applications throughout the system, throughout the software development lifecycle. These tools are coordinated by organizations that follow DevOps practices, and they typically support one or more activities that are crucial for specific DevOps initiatives. So these activities include things like planning, creating, verifying, packaging, releasing, configuring, monitoring and version control. And since DevOps is more of a practice than technology, there's no single tool that can handle all the stages of software development. So we get to cover all of them. Instead, essentially it's to form a series of tools or a tool chain to address the various needs of each stage of the DevOps pipeline. And I want to address all those at every stage, all the tools, all the things. And there are a ton of open source DevOps tools available out there. And there's also vendor based tools. I'm not going to ignore or neglect vendor based tools. I think they play a huge role in modern software development. So by combining all the open source tools, the vendor tools, you create a DevOps tool chain that makes product delivery faster and more efficient. So let's go over really quickly the different stages of the DevOps process and the tools associated with each stage. First, as I mentioned, you have the planning stage, which involves defining and planning the business value and application requirements. So this stage includes tasks like setting production metrics, establishing requirements, determining business metrics, planning release schedules, and defining security policies. And the planning stage typically involves collaboration between various IT personal software developers, architects and security. Next we have the creation stage, but focus on the design coding configuration of the software development process. And this stage includes activities like software design, coding, software builds, and creating release candidates. So tools and vendors in this category often overlap other categories reflecting the nature of DevOps, which aims to break down silos. Then there's the verification stage, which ensures the quality of the software release. This stage involves activities such as acceptance testing, regression testing, security vulnerability analysis, performance testing and configuration testing. So that's why we're not going to forget about performance testing. We're still going to cover performance testing on this show, so don't worry. And so solutions for this stage generally fall into four categories. You have automation, static analysis, test lab, and security. Packaging is then the next stage, which involves activities related to preparation, preparing the release for deployment, sometimes referred to as staging or pre production. Tasks in this stage include approvals, package configuration, trigger releases and release staging and holding, ephemeral environments, things like that. And after that, we have the release stage, which obviously encompasses activities like release coordination, application deployment and promotion, rollbacks and recovery, and schedule or time releases. So solutions covering this aspect of the tool chain include application release automation, deployment automation, and release management. In addition to all these stages, a successful DevOps tool change should also include planning solutions, collaboration and communication tools, source code management tools, continuous testing tools, and test automation tools. And these tools help teams identify and implement business calls, improve communication, track code changes, automated testing, and much more. So that's an overview of what I think the DevOps toolchain is and the type of topics and areas we're going to be focusing in on. We're excited about this new direction. We hope you are excited as well. I'd love to hear your feedback if you'd like to actually be a guest on the show. To address any areas of the DevOps toolchain that I just covered, all you need to do is head on over to testskill.com podcast ideas, submit your name, your email and your idea and I will send you a link to schedule a time for an interview recording and for links of everything of value we covered in this DevOps toolchain show, head on over to testguild.com P1 12 and while you're there, make sure to click on the SmartBear link and learn all about SmartBear's awesome solutions to give you the visibility you need to deliver great software. That's Smart Bear so that's it for this first episode of the DevOps Toolchain Show. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack DevOps toolchain awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the fam@testguild.com and if you're in the DevOps automation software testing space or you're a test tool provider and want to offer real world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the Guild community, I'd love to hear from you. Head ON over to testguild.info and let's make it happen.

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