Industry Trends and Performance
One software vendor ask me, along with a few other performance professionals, to answer questions related to performance trends. But they changed their mind and never published it – leaving me to contemplate which particular thought they didn’t like… Well, here are their questions and my answers:
What do you think is the “next big thing in performance” – or what should we all keep an eye out for in 2018?
I believe that the main trend for the next several years will be incorporating performance engineering into the modern development approaches centered around quick delivery of changes (whatever specific term would be – iterative, agile, continuous, DevOps, etc). That, of course, should involve more automation to performance checks. While many tools provide some help here nowadays, in most cases you need to do a lot of plumbing in more complex cases. As well as analysis and reporting should go beyond arithmetic and include some AI/ML.
Are there any industry trends that you find either overrated or underrated in regards to performance?
Most modern performance-related trends appear to be overrated – representing a technique touching one aspect of performance (and usually well-known for long time). In over 50 years of performance engineering history a lot of problems were already solved. So, in many cases there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, we need a holistic approach to performance instead of looking for silver bullets.
Let’s take DevOps, for instance. DevOps is supposed to drastically improve feedback from production to development and free flow of performance information both ways; so, a holistic approach to performance should be one of its main advantages. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like such a holistic approach happens often. Rather, “DevOps” teams just drop more sophisticated parts of performance testing or engineering and rely more on reactive approach to performance issues. They concentrate more on quick fixes of the issues rather than on preventing them. You may check my post Shift Left, Shift Right – Is It Time for a Holistic Approach? for more thoughts.
