Best Performance Conference Ever
Well, let’s say CMG ImPACt would be the best on my memory at least in the area I am interested in: performance engineering and performance testing. And great on other performance- and capacity- related topics, including performance analysis of different platforms, capacity planning, performance tuning and optimization of traditional and emerging platforms, benchmarking, virtualization, and so on, and so on – up to a special track on the intersection security and performance (but I’d leave it to other to write more about all these topics).
The CMG imPACt conference (imPACt stands for Internet, Mobile, Performance and Capacity, Cloud, and Technology if you ever wonder) will be held on November 7-10, 2016 in La Jolla, CA.
It is rather a challenge to write about a conference. If you start just to list numbers, topics, and names – over 100 hours of technical content provided by 95 industry experts and real world practitioners from 12 countries – it would be too boring, too much information.
If you just point to the full schedule, you may miss what is great there. Especially considering that formatting, unfortunately, is not the best. Actually it may look better on the EventsXD mobile application (and the EventXD event home page for CMG imPACt).
There are pages highlighting some speakers and sessions – but just some of them (work in progress – so I hope they would be more complete soon).
Well, still must to mention that we not only have a record number of great performance engineering and performance testing sessions – but we got a lot of renown experts in this area (in addition to a great number of performance experts who are CMG veterans). Such names, for example, as Mark Tomlinson, James Pulley, Eric Proegler, Todd DeCapua, Goranka Bjedov, Scott Moore, Andreas Grabner should be known to those who follows the field. You see speakers from Facebook, Docker, SOASTA, DynaTrace, New Relic, BlazeMeter, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HPE to mention just a few…
Another unique feature is the CMG-T training program – must to attend for people entering the field or changing specialization. It includes Monday morning training sessions, this year included into the price of conference registration. And other CMG-T sessions (tutorials about specific subjects spanning 2 or 3 timeslots taught by leading experts) spread across the rest 3.5 days – so you may attend most of them if you want (look for CMG-T in the schedule for details). In a short time you may get up to speed in multiple performance-related areas attending one event – a unique opportunity you won’t find anywhere else.
And, of course, it would be a lot of interesting events during the conference and the location – La Jolla, CA (which is one of the most interesting parts of San Diego, CA – 11th on the list of the top US attractions) – is great.
Finally I want to get back to the title as, I guess, may be other opinions. The title reflects my current understanding of performance engineering and existing events. I don’t want in any way to say that other conferences are not good – they just don’t cover performance engineering end-to-end.
Velocity conferences are great conferences for web front-end performance and web operations. If you are a front-end developer – it is a place for you. They are expanding coverage and, for example, the coming Velocity New York conference has a much more diverse program that it used to have. Still, for example, back-end performance is practically not touched. So Velocity would be rather a complement to ImPACt for web front-end performance and DevOps than a direct competitor. Surge conference and Performance @Scale are other examples of great performance-related conferences, covering some topics – in this case some aspects of large-scale web system design and operations. Of course, there are many vendor conferences covering performance aspects of their products (like Oracle Open World for Oracle products and technologies).
So if you want to dive in depth of a specific subject, you may find great conferences and events around. But if you are interested in performance end-to-end and need to know about multiple techniques and technologies (that is quite typical for a performance professional), the CMG imPACt conference is the best bet for you.
Here is the link for registration. The ‘Early Bird’ rate ends September 11th.
