Adopting Continuous Performance Engineering (CPE) within your company is the key to fostering collaboration and optimizing your application’s performance throughout its development lifecycle.
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What is continuous performance engineering?
Continuous Performance Engineering (CPE) is a proactive, continuous, and comprehensive assessment of an application’s performance, encompassing both testing and monitoring. It fosters seamless collaboration among teams, tools, and processes through constant iteration. The primary goal is to achieve optimal performance from the earliest design phases through to the application’s deployment into production.
What are the differences between continuous performance engineering and performance testing?
Firstly, what is performance testing?
Performance testing is usually conducted by a QA team in collaboration with developers and business teams to ensure an application’s speed, responsiveness, and stability under a given load. These tests may require significant involvement from developers and business teams to provide the initial scenario as well as various possible test cases to the QA team. They are generally performed at specific points in the development cycle, particularly before a major release goes live.
CPE is an approach that involves integrating performance tests at the earliest possible stage of the development cycle and forms part of a continuous improvement approach throughout the material’s life cycle.
Why is continuous performance important for your company?
Continuous performance is crucial to your business for several key reasons:
- Reliability
End customers expect reliable service quality. This reliability is ensured when the product is perceived as high-performing and robust, thanks to continuous and rigorous evaluation across multiple development cycles, which are regularly validated by the IPC.
- Lower costs
CPE helps to prevent breakdowns by continuously identifying problems throughout the lifecycle. This allows them to be quickly resolved before they not only have an impact on customers, but also the company’s revenues, since every interruption to the service comes at a cost.
- Optimising resources
Process automation and dynamic scaling ensure that resources can be adjusted in line with actual requirements, thereby reducing the costs associated with over- or under-utilisation of infrastructure.
- Competitiveness
By incorporating agile methodologies and fostering close collaboration within teams, teams are able to launch new products more quickly without compromising product quality. This allows them to stand out in the market and, as a result, be more competitive.
- Brand image
The various points noted above all feed into the image of a responsive and reliable modern company that listens to its customers.
Core fundamentals of continuous performance engineering
Continuous process improvement
The notion of continuous improvement is included in both an agile approach and in DevOps; in fact, CPE perfectly integrates this culture. Here are some important points that will add operational value to your projects:
- Real-time monitoring:
Tools are put in place so that system performance can be continuously monitored, bottlenecks can be detected and therefore any problems are anticipated before they start to have an impact on users.
- Automated performance testing:
Regular automated tests are carried out to assess system performance, identify potential regressions and highlight areas for improvement.
- Agile DevOps collaboration:
The points mentioned require excellent communication across the development, operations, and quality teams. This also helps distribute responsibility for the project across the teams.
- Continuous improvement:
As you will have seen, a requisite of CPE is close collaboration over time to capitalise on feedback and to improve the team’s working methods, as well as enhancing performance.
Performance evaluation and optimisation
Application performance is a critical issue today, as end users expect a fast and reliable response. Failure to deliver this leads to frustration and damages the brand’s reputation, with a potential impact on new customer acquisition.
IPC ensures the robustness, efficiency, and responsiveness of systems throughout the application lifecycle. This iterative process relies on proactive monitoring and the implementation of concrete solutions, whether they involve infrastructure, code, or network optimizations. Through constant monitoring, we can ensure that deliverables will be high-performing, scalable, and reliable.
Collaboration and communication
Collaboration and communication are key factors in continuous performance engineering, and it is these elements that ensure how effective EPC can be:
- Cross-team collaboration
- Fluid, transparent communication
- Aligning objectives and sharing responsibility
Teams need to make sure that their priorities are aligned as early as possible in the process so that they can be certain of a shared vision and relevant operational efficiency.
Tools and techniques for continuous performance engineering
Performance analysis methods
For proactive monitoring, teams have several analysis methods at their disposal; here are a few of the best-known examples:
Real-time monitoring
Real-time monitoring is essential for continuously collecting system performance data (CPU, memory, network, latency, response time, etc.). It allows you to view the entire path of a request and take appropriate action if certain APIs take too long to respond.
Tools: Appdynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog, etc.
Load and stress tests
Load and stress tests simulate a gradual increase in load on the application to observe how it behaves during peak traffic. This allows us to evaluate the application’s ability to handle high traffic volumes.
Tools: Octoperf, Neoload, Apache JMeter, Gatling, K6 etc.
Bottleneck analysis
This method includes looking at the system to identify potential bottlenecks that could limit application performance.
Tools: Dynatrace, VisualVM etc.
Log analysis
Log analysis allows you to examine events and track customer requests. You can also create visual dashboards to track data by number of requests, location, number of technical or functional exceptions, and so on.
Tools: Splunk, Elastic (ElasticSearch, LogStash, Kibana), etc.
Performance management tools
With regard to performance management tools, here are some examples of the visualisations you can obtain and interact with:
Although Dynatrace offers a wide range of tools, here we’ll focus on the one that lets you track the path of an HTTP request and analyze performance in detail, identifying the requests that take the longest. This then allows you to collaborate with the responsible team to develop an appropriate action plan.
Like Dynatrace, Datadog also lets you view the contents of a query.
ELK, meanwhile, allows you to design custom dashboards to visualise your application’s usage and performance in real time, providing complete visibility of resource consumption and facilitating instant analyses of critical data.
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Automation and technology
As you can see, the Agile and DevOps culture is deeply embedded in IPC’s culture; automation plays a key role in streamlining processes, minimizing manual effort, and improving team efficiency.
The benefits of continuous performance engineering
Increase operational efficiency
IPC helps increase your teams’ operational efficiency by improving their responsiveness, automating repetitive tasks, optimizing resource utilization, and reducing costs and response times. Our article (available here) on IT Performance Management also provides more information.
By incorporating IPC practices, you improve not only operational efficiency but also the quality of your teams’ deliverables.
Reduce costs
CPE helps reduce costs by optimising the use of resources, automating processes, reinforcing system stability, and encouraging a proactive approach to maintenance.
By improving operational efficiency and managing resources in greater detail, CPE enables companies to significantly reduce expenses associated with infrastructure, downtime and maintenance.
Improve product and service quality
IPC ensures optimal performance, continuous availability, and proactive issue management. By incorporating regular automated testing, real-time monitoring, and seamless collaboration among teams, IPC not only improves the quality of deliverables but also enhances the overall efficiency of operations.
Improving competitiveness
IPC ensures high-quality deliverables, faster time-to-market, and greater responsiveness to customer needs. This will enable you to respond more quickly and effectively to customer requests, while avoiding potential frustrations.
How can we encourage continuous performance engineering?
Steps to successful implementation
To set up effective CPE, there are several key steps to follow:
- Setting a performance target
Quantify the performance metrics you want to achieve (response time, customer satisfaction, server availability, etc.). These objectives will serve as benchmarks throughout the project.
- Develop an Agile and DevOps culture in teams
Involve development, operations, and Q&A teams in building a proactive, collaborative and automated culture right from the start of the project, ensuring that responsibility is shared throughout the lifecycle.
- Set up automation (deployment, testing, monitoring, etc.)
Select the tools that will be needed for the IPC (e.g., Dynatrace, GitLab CI/CD, etc.)
- Integrating performance testing
Automate and integrate performance tests into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure that no regression takes place with each new code version.
- Monitor and analyse performance
Regularly collect, visualise and analyse performance metrics to identify potential bottlenecks.
- Continuous optimisation
Based on the results of analysing various metrics, follow optimisation processes to improve performance.
By following these steps, you’ll put in place a robust CPE process that not only guarantees optimum performance, but also the ability to continually adapt to the changing needs of your business and your users.
Best practices for sustainable performance
To maintain IPC over the long term, it is essential to take a proactive, collaborative, and automated approach.
Team cohesion also plays a key role in maintaining long-term effectiveness. By fostering close collaboration and integrating automated processes, you ensure seamless performance management and continuous adaptation to future changes and challenges.
Qim info helps you engineer continuous performance
Drawing on their expertise in Agile and DevOps, the Qim info teams ensure the continuous optimization of your systems’ performance, tailored to your business requirements.
From defining performance goals to continuous optimization, the Qim info teams are committed to improving your performance.
Choosing Qim Info for an IPC means opting for continuous improvement of your applications and more robust, responsive systems, enabling you to offer your users a seamless experience and improve your time-to-market.
