Alex Podelko

Updated the list of my publications. Suddenly a lot happened in December.

At the CMG Conference I presented the latest version of my performance requirements view: Performance Requirements: the Backbone of the Performance Engineering Process, paper and presentation.

Also at the CMG Conference I presented Load Testing: See a Bigger Picture, paper and presentation. A magazine version of it, A Bird’s-Eye View of Load Testing, was published in the December issue of Software Test and Quality Assurance Magazine.

My notes on Performance Testing in the Cloud: Look Beyond the Word were published in the December issue of Testing Experience.

My post Performance: See the Whole Picture was included in 2012 Performance Calendar.

My next talk, Agile Aspects of Performance Testing, would be at Belgium Testing Days in Brussels, Belgium on March 1, 2013. Belgium Testing Days is a great global testing conference in spite of its rather local name – just check the program. All areas of testing covered – even performance testing is well represented, that is rather unusual for testing conferences.

CMG’12 is an annual conference organized by Computer Management Group – a volunteer organization of professionals specialized in performance, capacity, and IT service management. This year it is held in Las Vegas, December 2-7, 2012.

Why I love CMG, spend a lot of my time organizing and promoting it, and coming there every year (sometimes on my own)? Well, because I believe that it is the best (and actually the only) conference on performance and capacity, the main topic of my interest for the last fifteen years. There are many conferences on specific topics. For example, the Velocity conference, devoted to web performance, is significantly larger and more popular – but it is still devoted mainly to single-use web performance, leaving all other performance and capacity questions to CMG. Let me share some of my excitement – of course, from my personal point of view (there is plenty of other highlights, but I am mentioning only the ones that are close to my heart).

This year the conference covers all aspects of performance (well, almost all – performance is so sophisticated subject that there is always much more to learn) from Web Performance Optimization (the conference opens by the keynote by Patrick Meenan, a web performance Google guru and the creator of WebPagetest) to mainframe performance (and everything in between).

The conference starts with a half-day workshops – see here the description. In addition to workshops, there are CMG-T sessions during the whole conference. Each CMG-T class spans 2 or 3 session spots, so it could easily be considered as a workshop or a training class. All led by renown experts with tons of experience, you hardly would get anybody even remotely close if you engage in a typical vendor class (not to mention a unique vendor-neutral or vendor-agnostic perspective you hardly find anywhere else). You have the CMG-T track through the whole conference and every one of them is a gem:

• Capacity Planning by Ray Wicks
• z/OS Basics by Glenn Anderson
• Java Performance Analysis and Tuning by Peter Johnson
• Model and Forecasting Basics by Dr. Michael Salsburg
• Network Performance Management by Manoj Nambiar
• Windows System Performance Management and Analysis by Jeffry Schwartz
• Using SAS to Communicate Your Message by MP Welch

CMG’12 has 4 keynote/plenary session and almost a hundred regular track sessions going on from mid-Monday to mid-Friday. The conference is 5 tracks wide. One track, as I already mentioned, is CMG-T 101– type classes (with 301-depth). Others four tracks shared between five subject areas: Performance Engineering and Testing, Capacity Planning, Application Performance Management, IT Service Management, and Hot Topics. It is difficult to list all highlights – too many. While I know many great presenters and am fascinated by many topics, commenting every single one would take too much time and space. Probably you just need to look at agenda – there are three different views: preliminary agenda (overview, a day on a page), a list of abstracts in a single pdf document and search/scheduler (click on the abstract number to see the abstract).

One track on Wednesday is a Michelson award track. CMG is presenting Michelson award since 1974 (if you wonder, Albert Abraham Michelson was known for his technical accomplishments in measuring the speed of light and for his role as teacher and inspirer of others – and measuring is the key to performance). This year we will see many Michelson winners presenting: Dr. Connie Smith, the founder of Software Performance Engineering, Dr. Daniel Menasce, the author of many great books about performance and capacity planning, Adam Grummit, the author of the great Capacity Management book (ITSM Library) and the CMG president, Dr. Pat Artis, Bruce McNutt, and Dr. Michael Salsburg.

I believe that the main advantage of attending CMG is networking with best world experts in almost all areas of performance and capacity. Nowadays you can find all technical information on the Internet, but there is no substitution to face-to-face conferences to learn how to use it and what were people experiences, and, of course, to see the whole picture. Especially in performance: performance is the result of every design and implementation detail and you need to be learning all the time to keep up with coming challenges.

I am presenting there too: Load Testing: See a Bigger Picture on Thursday and
Performance Requirements: the Backbone of the Performance Engineering Process on Friday. Nothing comparing to other CMG’12 highlights, but I hope to trigger discussions around these two very important topics.

And, of course, it is Las Vegas – and Rio’s rate is $55 per night until November 14th. See you there!

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) calls for papers and presentations for CMG’s 38th International Conference to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 3rd through 7th, 2012.

The 2012 CMG conference will cover all areas of systems management, including but not limited to: capacity planning, IT service management, application performance management, performance engineering and testing, as well as the latest developments in the overall field of computer performance evaluation. See the Call for Papers and Call for Workshops for details.

CMG is the source of unbiased and objective expert information and practical, real life experiences across all computing platforms in the computer industry for over 30 years. Share your knowledge and experiences: write a paper and submit it for presentation at CMG’12.

Paper are categorized as Introductory, Tutorial, Advanced, or User Experience. I want to especially encourage all of you to consider writing a User Experience paper. Every year, the conference evaluations show a common theme: “More User Experience Papers, please!” You don’t need to be one of the field’s superstars to write one — in fact, they seem to work better from people who are just working in the field, in non-IT companies and government bodies. Just tell us what problem you faced, how you went about figuring out what the cause was, and how you dealt with it. Mentors are available for writing assistance, and may be requested at any point in the writing process, including before the paper is started. Just write mentor@cmg.org and ask.

Please take the time to participate in the CMG’12 program. It will be rewarding for both authors and attendees, and as we all share our knowledge we all become more complete professionals.
Paper submission through the CMG website is now available. For more information go to paper submission and workshop submission.

The deadline for paper submissions is June 8, 2012.

Please send questions to CMG’12 Program Chair, Bill Jouris at cmgpc@cmg.org.

Reading Who should be on your WPO team? reminded me so many things I read before like, for example, creating a SPE team or creating Performance Center of Excellence.

Looks like we got a completely new area of performance engineering – Web Performance Optimization (WPO), with its own terminology, approaches, experts , Web Performance meeting groups, Velocity conference, and, perhaps, even new load testing tools like CloudTest (according to my impression, it is more beneficial for WPO projects). WPO actually was around for a while (looks like the first Velocity conference was in 2008), but only recently, after attending a couple of New York Web Perf events, I realized that it became a separate discipline. I guess the appearance of this new movement concentrated on the web performance means that we get a pretty mature industry of very scalable web sites delivering sophisticated content.

Well , the history of performance engineering looks like a series of waves (for me, although my knowledge of its history is limited, especially for the period before I got involved). Computer Measurement Group (CMG) was organized in 1975 as an organization of performance analysts and capacity planners. Dr. Connie Smith book “Performance Engineering of Software Systems” book was published in 1990 created the Software Performance Engineering movement.

Distributed systems brought new wave of performance engineering based around load testing. Perhaps because there was not much instrumentation available and only way to make sure that the system performs was to apply load. It looks like the first version of LoadRunner was shipped in 1989. But when I first time got involved into load testing in 1997 with SQL Bench (SilkPerformer’s ancestor), it was still far from what we expect from load testing tools now. The latest wave was probably Application Performance Management with a large array of tools promising application instrumentation (visibility in what is going on inside applications).
It is interesting that all these overlapping areas never completely merged. This is probably the reason why we have such discrepancy in performance terminology because every group often started terminology from a scratch (while others still used old terminology).

And now we get Web Performance Optimization (looks like the term was coined by Steve Souders). While WPO looks like a separate discipline, I’d rather placed it as a part of overall performance engineering. You still have a back end in most cases – and while the back end is mentioned in the WPO presentations, it sometimes looks like authors mention something trivial. Well, it is not, even for most web sites, not to mention large banks and insurance companies with many tiers of sophisticated systems in the back – and for the end-user performance you need to consider all together. Downplaying “back end” is probably as wrong as downplaying “front end” (which, working mostly with business applications, I am definitely guilty – well, historically load testing concentrated on the server performance). The importance of each component depends on the system. In my opinion, performance principles are much more generic that the details of specific technologies. Most of performance engineering experience may be applied to any technology (you, of course, still need to learn something about this new technology too).

So, while it is very promising and exciting that we get a new wave of people dedicated to performance, it is a little sad that it looks like it often gets started from a scratch inventing new terminology and ignoring what existed before. For me it would be better if we get all these waves together to enrich each other with the area of performance engineering they specialize in. Of course, there are some interaction – well, you need to work together in a way to ensure systems’ performance – but it still looks like every wave tend to stay somewhat separate, cultivating their own terminology, approaches, and events.

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) calls for papers and presentations for CMG’s 37th International Conference to be held in Washington, DC, December 5th through 9th, 2011. The 2011 CMG conference will cover all areas of systems management, including but not limited to: measurement and tuning, modeling and statistics, capacity planning, performance engineering and load testing, management and reporting, as well as the latest developments in the overall field of computer performance evaluation.

Of special interest for CMG’11 will be presentations relating to this year’s theme of Optimizing IT Infrastructures: Management, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing.

CMG is the source of unbiased and objective expert information and practical, real life experiences across all computing platforms in the computer industry for over 30 years. Share your knowledge and experiences: write a paper and submit it for presentation at CMG’11.

Submissions at introductory through advanced levels are welcomed and encouraged. We especially look for papers based on user experiences. These often provide value that can be immediately applied in one’s own environment.

Abstracts should be submitted by May 15, 2011. Papers are due by June 10, 2011.

All paper and presentation submissions will be evaluated through a blind peer-referee process and will be categorized as Introductory, Tutorial, Advanced, or User Experience. Mentors are available for writing assistance and should be requested early in the writing process. Editorial assistance is provided for all accepted papers.

For more information on the paper submission process please go to:
http://www.cmg.org/conference/paper-system.html

Please send questions to the CMG’11 Program Chair at cmgpc@cmg.org

I uploaded my CMG’10 presentations to my site.

One was A Load Testing Story. It just described one of my recent load testing projects chronologically. The point was to share some challenges of load testing and demonstrate that it may be not as trivial as sometimes believed.

Another, The Obscure World of Performance Requirements, was a small update of my old performance requirements presentation / paper. It was still a collection of topics related to performance requirements without many interconnections, but preparing it this time I got an idea how to arrange it in a more cohesive way; maybe I’d do this by CMG’11.

This year there is a separate subject area for Load Testing at CMG’10 (held December 6-10 in Orlando, Florida) in addition to the Performance Engineering subject area. The number of performance testing and performance engineering sessions significantly increased. Of course, there are a lot of excellent sessions in traditionally strong CMG areas such as capacity planning, monitoring, performance analysis, and modeling. Two Distinguished Speakers are talking about performance testing: Scott Barber, CTO of PerfTestPlus and Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez. They also participate in the panel: Do we need Load Testing 2.0? Peter Johnson is doing a Load Testing CMG-T class. So it makes even more sense for performance testers and performance engineers to attend. See agenda for details. Conference proceedings up to 2007 are open for public.

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) calls for papers and presentations for for CMG’s 36th International Conference to be held in Kissimmee, Florida, December 6th through 10th, 2010. The 2010 CMG conference will cover all areas of systems management, including but not limited to: capacity planning, management and reporting, modeling and statistics, measurement, tuning, performance engineering and load testing, as well as the latest developments in the overall field of computer performance evaluation.

Since 1975 CMG is a volunteer organization of performance professionals and the CMG conference is the best place to learn about performance analysis, capacity planning, and related subjects.

This year CMG has separate subject areas for Load Testing and Performance Engineering.

Mentoring is available.

Proceedings up to 2007 are available to everybody (free registration required).

There is a good newsletter and local groups.