July 2019 Summaries

Cloud modernization is an ongoing process that involves continually evaluating and optimizing cloud applications, infrastructure, and services to achieve business and IT goals. It's not a one-time, one-size-fits-all proposition, but rather a continuous commitment that requires full-stack observability to cope with the increasing complexity of cloud systems. Modernization approaches include rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring, which aim to transform legacy applications into something more agile, elastic, and available. Continual modernization is worth the effort, as it can lead to significant benefits such as cost reductions, faster deployment cycles, and improved customer experience. However, moving to the cloud is only the first step, and organizations must continue to modernize and optimize their applications to achieve the full benefits of the cloud. Observability is key to successful cloud modernization, enabling real-time monitoring and analytics to drive agility within development and operations practices. A structured approach to developing a cloud modernization strategy involves assessment and analysis, defining objectives, selecting the right cloud model, migration planning, security and compliance, optimization and cost management, continuous improvement, monitoring and maintenance, and ongoing evaluation and iteration. Successful cloud modernization never ends, requiring a robust DevOps strategy and practice that delivers deep, real-time, full-stack observability to drive business success in the cloud.

Business applications must continually evolve to address new challenges and opportunities, often by moving IT environments to the cloud. This process, known as cloud modernization, involves approaches like rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring to optimize applications and infrastructure for cloud-native benefits. Unlike cloud migration, which primarily focuses on transferring existing systems with minimal changes, cloud modernization emphasizes transforming these systems to leverage the full capabilities of the cloud, such as scalability and innovation. Continuous cloud modernization fosters business agility, accelerates time-to-market, and enhances customer engagement while reducing costs. However, it requires ongoing commitment and observability to navigate the complexity of modern cloud systems. Companies often find that as they modernize applications, they simultaneously modernize their business practices, leading to benefits like significant cost reductions and faster deployment cycles. Successful cloud modernization demands a strategic approach that includes assessment, objective-setting, migration planning, and continuous optimization, with observability playing a crucial role in ensuring system performance and stability.

When customers ask about improving customer end-user experience and reducing operating costs in the public cloud, it's often related to stability, performance, and cost control issues. Companies like restaurants and government agencies face unique challenges, such as maintaining a good customer experience while controlling costs. To address these concerns, businesses run scalability testing, but unexpected spikes in traffic can make scaling difficult due to technical complexities. Over-provisioning in the cloud eats into margins, so companies look for ways to minimize it. New Relic helps by providing insights into user experience and resource usage, enabling performance-based cost optimization without impacting customer experience. With features like Kubernetes integration and Lambda integration, customers can understand performance and resource utilization in a single view, right-size services, and optimize cloud costs.

Organizations across various industries, such as finance, government, and hospitality, face the dual challenge of enhancing customer experience while reducing public cloud operating costs, particularly in light of unexpected traffic spikes that require scalable solutions. For example, a restaurant chain aims to ensure customers can place orders within two minutes, requiring over-provisioning of cloud resources, which incurs significant costs. Although technologies like autoscaling, PaaS, and Kubernetes can mitigate over-provisioning, they cannot eliminate it entirely. New Relic offers solutions to optimize cloud costs by providing insights into user experience and resource usage, enabling performance-based cost optimization without compromising customer service. Recent enhancements, including Kubernetes and Lambda integrations, allow for a comprehensive analysis of application performance and resource utilization, helping organizations right-size services and control expenses.

New Relic has curated a list of summer reading recommendations from its colleagues, covering topics relevant to software developers and tech-industry professionals. The suggestions include books on coding languages like Go, production-ready microservices, stress management, productivity, teamwork, workplace culture, decision-making, and leadership. These titles aim to provide insights for improving skills, reducing stress, and enhancing overall well-being, making them ideal companions for a relaxing summer vacation or a productive work break.

Summer vacation presents an ideal opportunity to catch up on reading, especially for tech professionals, with a diverse selection of recommended books that cater to software developers and those interested in reducing workplace stress, improving cognitive skills, and fostering better team and organizational culture. Some notable recommendations include "The Go Programming Language" for mastering Go, "Production-Ready Microservices" for insights into preparing services for production, and "Making Work Visible" for techniques to combat workplace time theft. Additionally, "Mindset" by Dr. Carol Dweck explores the psychology of success, while "Sources of Power" by Gary Klein delves into decision-making in stressful situations. Titles like "The Goal" and "The Culture Code" focus on improving team dynamics and workplace culture. For leisure reading, "Reality Is Not What It Seems" offers a journey into quantum gravity, and "Quicksilver" provides a historical romp through Baroque-era Europe. The list also highlights Java-related works by new team member Ben Evans, including "Java in a Nutshell" and "Optimizing Java." The article encourages exploring previous reading lists for more options and notes its views are those of the author, Matthew McKenzie, a veteran writer and IT industry analyst.

We're incredibly proud of the roster of distinguished guests we've welcomed to the New Relic Modern Software Podcast over our first 30 episodes, but none shine brighter than our special for this 31st episode: New Relic Chief Revenue Officer Erica Schultz. Business is dynamic and ever-evolving, with companies undertaking massive digital transformations as they offer new digital customer experiences and migrate to the cloud. This creates a lot of pressure on technology teams to deliver and partner with the business. Customers are facing significant challenges, including talent acquisition, getting their teams working together effectively, and delivering high-quality digital experiences. New Relic's mission is to instrument, measure, and improve the internet to help customers create more perfect software and experiences. The company has a broad platform that monitors infrastructure performance as well as customer experience, with many integrations into different data sources. New Relic is also investing in its capabilities to partner with large enterprises, including shoring up its customer success organization and services offerings. Looking forward, the company aims to become a more strategic platform for customers, enabling them to stop using multiple monitoring tools and becoming a true partner.

New Relic's Modern Software Podcast features an interview with Erica Schultz, the company's Chief Revenue Officer, discussing key topics such as the dynamic nature of business, the importance of digital transformation, and New Relic's mission of enhancing internet observability to aid customers in creating superior software experiences. Schultz shares insights on how companies are leveraging technology to transform their business models and improve customer experiences, particularly through cloud adoption and DevOps practices. She highlights the challenges of scaling operations, maintaining high-performance digital experiences, and the role of observability in addressing these issues. Schultz also emphasizes the value of strategic partnerships and New Relic's comprehensive platform, which supports customers in their high-stakes moments by ensuring system reliability and responsiveness. Additionally, she reflects on her career path and the importance of building new business initiatives, underscoring New Relic's growth trajectory and its commitment to being a strategic partner for enterprise clients.

The cloud computing landscape is constantly evolving, and staying informed about the latest developments requires following key figures in the industry. This list of smart, cloud-focused individuals includes practitioners, pundits, visionaries, and deal-makers who continually advance the technology and push it into the enterprise mainstream. These influencers come from various backgrounds, including senior director roles at top companies like New Relic and Amazon Web Services, CEO positions at Salesforce.com and VMware, and prominent research firms like RedMonk and Forrester Research. They are recognized for their expertise in cloud computing, innovation, and industry thought leadership, making them valuable resources for anyone looking to stay informed about the latest trends and advancements.

Keeping up with cloud computing developments is essential for understanding how companies build, deploy, and manage applications and infrastructure. The text highlights influential figures in the cloud industry, including Lee Atchison, Jeff Barr, Marc Benioff, and others, known for their significant contributions and thought leadership in cloud technology. These individuals range from practitioners and analysts to executives in major companies like Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, VMware, and Google Cloud, playing pivotal roles in the evolution and adoption of cloud solutions across enterprises. The author, Kevin Casey, emphasizes the importance of following these figures to stay informed about the latest trends and advancements in the cloud sector, while also noting that the views expressed are personal and not necessarily reflective of New Relic’s commercial solutions.

The New Relic Kubernetes integration provides a comprehensive monitoring solution for OpenShift clusters, offering infrastructure-centric and application-centric views into clusters. It is installed as a Kubernetes DaemonSet, which automatically runs on each node in the cluster. The integration reports data and metadata about nodes, namespaces, deployments, ReplicaSets, pods, clusters, and containers, enabling total visibility, alerting, and dashboards for all Kubernetes entities. After installation, users can navigate to New Relic Infrastructure, where they can examine their OpenShift cluster, locate specific pods, track resource requests, and set up alerts for high resource consumption. The integration also provides APM data about applications running in the cluster, allowing for deep application performance monitoring and correlation with OpenShift infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift is a managed Kubernetes platform designed to simplify the deployment and management of container-based applications. It offers various services, like an integrated container registry and a runtime built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, to streamline Kubernetes operations. However, due to the transient nature of Kubernetes workflows, advanced monitoring is crucial, which is where New Relic's integration comes in, providing comprehensive visibility into clusters at every level, including nodes, pods, and applications. As an officially certified OpenShift partner, New Relic offers infrastructure-centric and application-centric insights, with features like alerting and dashboards to monitor resource consumption and application performance. The integration involves setting up New Relic's Infrastructure agent as a Kubernetes DaemonSet and using kube-state-metrics to gather necessary metrics, enabling detailed monitoring of OpenShift environments. Users can link their New Relic APM data with OpenShift data for enhanced application performance monitoring, while also benefiting from distributed tracing and alert policies to manage resource consumption and performance issues effectively.

The concept of "user-centric perceived performance metrics" has become increasingly important for web development teams to optimize website speed and user experience. New Relic Browser now offers two such metrics, first paint and first contentful paint, which track the amount of time users wait for websites to start rendering or for a "web experience" to begin. These metrics help developers measure and optimize the user experience by answering questions like "How much time passes before users see content?" and "How much time passes before users can interact with elements on the page?" By adding these metrics, web developers can better quantify their end-user experience and more accurately gauge site performance against user engagement and perception.

Modern websites require dynamic performance metrics to assess user experience, beyond traditional timing metrics used in Web 1.0. New Relic Browser now supports two user-centric perceived performance metrics: first paint and first contentful paint, which measure when a user perceives a page as beginning to render. These metrics are crucial for understanding how quickly users see content and can interact with webpages, addressing the limitations of conventional page-load-time metrics. Available in Google Chrome and Opera, these metrics are integrated into New Relic One dashboards and can be utilized to create alerts and track performance trends. By focusing on these metrics, web development teams can optimize user experience by better understanding the visual rendering of content, and New Relic plans to expand its metric offerings to further enhance usability and site utility assessments.

In 2019, Java 11 started seeing significant adoption, with around 5% of production deployments using it by New Relic, surpassing the initial prediction of 10%. The development of GraalVM and its use in production was slower than expected, but it remains an area of interest for teams. OpenJDK became the preferred runtime for Java 11, and its adoption surpassed expectations. However, the release of Java 12 and 13 did not see significant production deployments by the end of 2019. The value types feature, now renamed inline classes, was not included in Java 13 as a preview or shipped version in Java 14. Kotlin continued to gain traction, but its adoption rate remained steady, without a surge in Java developers adopting it alongside their existing projects. Overall, most predictions were accurate, with some minor adjustments needed.

In 2018, Ben Evans made several predictions about the Java landscape for 2019, including the adoption of Java 11, which saw about 5% uptake by mid-year, aligning with his forecast. He anticipated limited migration from Java 8 to Java 11, with more new projects starting on Java 11, and noted that Graal, a new JIT compiler, was not yet widely adopted. OpenJDK surpassed expectations in becoming the market leader for Java runtimes, particularly for Java 11, as enterprises moved away from Oracle JDK due to support costs. Evans accurately predicted that Java 12 and 13 would be released on schedule but see minimal production use, while value types did not ship as a preview in Java 13, and Kotlin saw modest growth, primarily remaining popular in Android development. Overall, Evans expressed satisfaction with his predictions, acknowledging that the primary miss was underestimating the shift to OpenJDK over Oracle Java 11.

The mobile apps team at New Relic uses a combination of New Relic Mobile and New Relic APM 360 with custom Synthetics scripts to ensure high levels of app performance by monitoring API dependencies, running scripted API tests, and setting up synthetic checks that provide real-time insights into app reliability. By using these tools, they can identify potential issues early, resolve them quickly, and ship mobile apps that are highly performant for their users. The team shares a Synthetics script on GitHub to help other developers manage and respond to changes made by other teams' APIs.

Mobile app developers often face challenges due to dependencies on APIs managed by other teams, which can lead to app reliability issues if API structures change unexpectedly. To address this, the New Relic mobile apps team uses a combination of New Relic Mobile, New Relic APM 360, and custom New Relic Synthetics scripts to ensure robust app performance. Synthetics allows for automated, scriptable tools that monitor real-world performance and test API endpoints to validate expected responses. By employing these scripts, the team can proactively manage API changes, ensuring both staging and production environments remain stable, and address issues through "soft alerts" that notify the appropriate teams during work hours. This approach allows for early detection and resolution of API-dependency issues, thereby maintaining high performance in their mobile applications.

The software industry is shifting towards observability, a single solution that gathers and analyzes metrics, traces, and logs to provide full insight into a system's operation. Modern DevOps teams need a unified solution to monitor their applications and infrastructure, which can be achieved through the use of OpenTelemetry, an open standard for telemetry data collection. New Relic is committed to contributing to OpenTelemetry and providing support for its adoption, enabling customers to gather telemetry data from any source imaginable and achieve full observability throughout their systems.

Modern software teams are adapting to changes in monitoring applications and infrastructure due to the evolution of DevOps culture, the rise of cloud services, and the shift towards microservices-based architectures. This shift has led to the need for observability, which involves the aggregation, visualization, and analysis of metrics, traces, and logs to gain comprehensive insight into a system's operations. OpenTelemetry, an initiative under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is a significant development in this area, promising a standardized approach to telemetry data collection and integration. New Relic is actively contributing to OpenTelemetry's development, particularly for Java, Ruby, and Python, and is enhancing its New Relic One platform to support OpenTelemetry for an improved observability experience. The company is also developing telemetry APIs, open-source SDKs, and integrations with popular open-source tools to ensure seamless data collection and analysis. These efforts aim to position New Relic as a central player in the observability landscape, helping teams better understand their data and systems.

Performance engineering and load testing are crucial for modern software organizations to ensure their applications can handle increasing workloads and meet performance expectations. The process typically involves setting a baseline capacity, identifying bottlenecks, isolating the root cause, and then tuning to alleviate the issue. A systematic approach using tools like New Relic provides in-depth monitoring and insights into application performance, including browser response times, user sessions, application speed, and utilization of backend resources. By following a 12-step process outlined in this blog post, teams can methodically load test and analyze their applications to identify and address performance bottlenecks, ultimately improving the scalability and reliability of their software applications.

Performance engineering and load testing are essential components of modern software development, focusing on understanding an application's capacity, identifying bottlenecks, and enhancing scalability. Companies increasingly dedicate teams and resources to these processes, with tools like the New Relic platform offering comprehensive monitoring and analysis capabilities. The blog post outlines a 12-step process using New Relic for conducting methodical load testing and root-cause analysis, which is divided into setting baselines, isolating bottlenecks, and tuning performance. It emphasizes the iterative nature of performance engineering, where ongoing testing and adjustments are necessary due to the dynamic nature of software applications. The author, Rebecca Clinard, a seasoned expert in web application performance, shares insights based on her extensive experience, noting that the views expressed are her own and not necessarily those of New Relic.

In recent years, Java has undergone significant changes, including a shift in its support model and release schedule. Oracle has stopped providing free binaries for Java 8 and 11, instead opting for a faster, more dynamic release schedule with new major versions of Java released every six months. This change presents both opportunities and challenges for developers and enterprises using Java in the microservices world. Optimizing Java performance requires understanding the problem, finding data to confirm it, and then drilling down to find solutions such as reducing object creation, minimizing debug log messages, and properly configuring garbage collection. Anti-patterns like creating unnecessary objects or ignoring thread constraints can lead to performance issues like queuing nightmares and context switching. As Java continues to evolve, its relevance in the microservices world is ensured by its rich programming environment, ease of hiring developers, and modularity, which enable efficient deployment and scaling. New Relic's support for Java will continue to be crucial in helping customers navigate these changes and optimize their applications for performance and stability.

On the New Relic Modern Software Podcast, Java expert Ben Evans discusses the evolving Java landscape, focusing on Oracle's recent changes to Java support and licensing. Oracle no longer provides free binaries for Java 8 and 11, prompting users to seek alternatives like Red Hat's OpenJDK, which offers open-source binaries. This shift requires enterprises to adapt, especially those relying on Java's long-term support. While Oracle promotes a faster release cycle with upgrades every six months, many enterprises prioritize stability and may opt for OpenJDK to avoid frequent updates. Evans highlights how New Relic supports various Java distributions and is actively involved in the Java community, contributing to OpenJDK and helping backport Java 11 features to Java 8. The podcast also explores Java's relevance in a microservices world, addressing optimization challenges and anti-patterns, such as reducing application startup time and managing Java processes efficiently within Docker containers.

The Ignite program is an incubator for early career engineers at New Relic, designed to increase opportunities for early career engineers by providing extra support, mentoring, and coaching, as well as exposure to a broad technical overview of the company's systems. The initial cohort completed the program and moved up to Software Engineer 1 positions, sharing their skills learned during the program, including four tiers: Basics, Dangerous, Applied, and Subject Matter Expert. They emphasized the importance of self-directed study, reading documentation, using books and tutorials, building own projects, pairing with others, and asking questions, highlighting that becoming a software engineer is about learning efficiently, troubleshooting issues, and remaining curious. The Ignite program provided invaluable runway for skill acquisition, and the authors encourage interested individuals to try some of these learning steps, noting that the program continues to grow and evolve.

Earlier this year, New Relic launched the Ignite program to support early career engineers by providing mentorship, exposure to the company's systems, and a structured learning path. The program aims to minimize hiring risks by producing high-performing engineers from the outset. Participants, including Joshua Jones, Eileen Szeto, and Xi Xia, transitioned from Associate Software Engineers to Software Engineer 1 roles after completing the program. They gained various skills categorized into different tiers, from understanding the basics of tools and concepts like the DevOps cycle, TDD, and Apache Kafka, to becoming proficient in using command-line tools, version control, and databases. The program emphasized self-directed learning through documentation, books, tutorials, and independent projects, as well as collaborative learning by pairing with senior engineers. The Ignite program also facilitated understanding of team dynamics across New Relic, providing insights into the company's services and processes. The authors encourage aspiring engineers to apply to the program, which continues to evolve and expand, offering opportunities for growth and development in the field.