Effective Performance Engineering

Chapter 4. Tying It All Together

As more businesses experience devastating production incidents, they are recognizing that they need to change, and are working to implement Effective Performance Engineering practices. They’re restructuring their teams and redefining jobs such that some team members are focused on ensuring that the essential computer infrastructure and applications deliver good, stable performance at all times. They’re embracing practices in Performance Engineering and treating them as critical, adopting an organizational culture supporting this transformation, and rewarding individuals for their contributions.

Keep in mind that Performance Engineering doesn’t refer only to a specific job, such as a “performance engineer.” More generally, it refers to the set of skills and practices that are gradually being understood across organizations that focus on achieving higher levels of performance in technology, in the business, and for end users.

Many naive observers often take the same attitude toward Performance Engineering: it’s simply a matter of making sure the systems run fast. If possible, make them run really fast. When in doubt, just make them run really, really fast. And if that doesn’t work right away, throw money at the problem by buying more hardware to make the systems go really fast.

But just as there’s more to winning a track meet than being fast, there’s more to building a constellation of quick, efficient web servers and databases than being fast. Just ...