Red Hat and Oracle announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute Virtual Machines (VMs).
APMdigest asked experts from across Application Performance Management (APM) and related markets for their recommendations on the best ways to ensure application performance before app rollout. This final set of six recommendations covers topics including the development environment and deployment.
Start with Part 1 of this list
Start with Part 2 of this list
13. REPLICATION OF REAL-WORLD PRODUCTION CONDITIONS
Understand the logical complexity of your application, especially round trips at various levels of abstraction. Test the most logically complex components with production-like latency, reasonably complex inputs, and realistic load. Ideally, use the same profiling tool you would use in production, and make sure it can find meaningful problem correlations at scale. A top methods list will only show you where your time went processing your synthetic load.
Joe Rustad
Manager, Software Development & Architecture, Dell Software
Networked delivered applications are pervasive in todays businesses and its essential that we give developers and testers environments that that are "fit for the purpose" i.e. they accurately reflect the network an application is expected to run in - this ensures a much more robust application is produced and can substantially shorten the delivery time. Developers and testers can utilize industry standard tools such as Network Emulators which replicate the target networks and network conditions, eliminating any unwanted surprises when a new application is rolled out into the production environment.
Jim Swepson
Pre-sales Technologist, iTrinegy
14. CONTAINER TOOLS
Container tools provide the easiest, most effective and secure approach for ensuring application performance prior to rollout – not to mention, most affordable. An added level of virtualization that conveniently packages everything together, containers enable DevOps to decouple applications from underlying hardware and IT infrastructure, which among other things, make apps highly portable, as well as easier to share, test, deploy, fine-tune for performance and manage.
Don Boxley
CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i
15. BI-MODAL IT
Operations teams should adopt a bi-modal IT structure to optimize application release cycles and updates. A bi-modal structure focuses on increasing the application performance, speed and agility of operations, allowing for scaling applications and businesses without creating a shadow IT environment. By utilizing containerization to provide independent work spaces, applications can be optimized to increase performance. A bi-modal IT structure allows for a smooth development and deployment process from the onset.
Charlie Key
Founder of Modulus, a Progress company
16. COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE
Investing time into developing a coherent Collaboration and Communications Infrastructure (CCI) plan that outlines a set of procedures and policies for IT and end-users to follow is vital to ensuring top service performance. Having a CCI strategy in place will enhance enterprise IT collaboration capabilities and help assure the performance and availability of collaboration and communications services in the production environment.
Mike Segal
Director of Solutions Marketing, NetScout Systems
17. APPLICATION DIAGNOSTICS
Developers must go beyond instrumenting their apps to provide diagnostics like crash reporting, service monitoring, and transaction trace.
Mike Marks
Chief Product Evangelist, Aternity
18. INCREMENTAL DEPLOYMENT
Successful rollouts are all about manageability. First, deploy in phases (vs. a big bang approach), so you can learn as you go and change course as needed, including rolling back. Next, and complementary to the phased rollout, have key performance metrics from production environment against which you can compare in the pre-production environment and during each step of the deployment. For todays complex application systems, this is best accomplished with cross-tier transaction response times. The ability to compare application performance snapshots before and after deployment is also extremelly helpful.
Anand Akela
Director, APM Product Marketing, AppDynamics
Consider deploying the application to a limited number of test users in each site to get some preliminary testing done. Set expectations for how the application should perform and give users adequate time to acclimate and validate the new application as part of their workflow. How are users receiving the new application? What is the user experience like? Are there any issues that need to be resolved immediately?
Bruce Kosbab
CTO, Fluke Networks
Bruce Kosbab Blog: 9 Key Performance Considerations for App Rollouts
Industry News
The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University announced the release of a tool to give a comprehensive visualization of the complete DevSecOps pipeline.
Synopsys has entered into a definitive agreement with Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. and Francisco Partners.
Postman released v11, a significant update that speeds up development by reducing collaboration friction on APIs.
Sysdig announced the launch of the company’s Runtime Insights Partner Ecosystem, recognizing the leading security solutions that combine with Sysdig to help customers prioritize and respond to critical security risks.
Nokod Security announced the general availability of the Nokod Security Platform.
Drata has acquired oak9, a cloud native security platform, and released a new capability in beta to seamlessly bring continuous compliance into the software development lifecycle.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Q, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data.
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the latest version of the enterprise Linux platform.
ActiveState unveiled Get Current, Stay Current (GCSC) – a continuous code refactoring service that deals with breaking changes so enterprises can stay current with the pace of open source.
Lineaje released Open-Source Manager (OSM), a solution to bring transparency to open-source software components in applications and proactively manage and mitigate associated risks.
Synopsys announced the availability of Polaris Assist, an AI-powered application security assistant on the Synopsys Polaris Software Integrity Platform®.
Backslash Security announced the findings of its GPT-4 developer simulation exercise, designed and conducted by the Backslash Research Team, to identify security issues associated with LLM-generated code. The Backslash platform offers several core capabilities that address growing security concerns around AI-generated code, including open source code reachability analysis and phantom package visibility capabilities.
Azul announced that Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul’s cloud analytics solution -- which provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to dramatically boost developer productivity -- now supports Oracle JDK and any OpenJDK-based JVM (Java Virtual Machine) from any vendor or distribution.