BMC announced two new product innovations, BMC AMI DevX Code Insights and BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise.
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
Rafay Systems announced the availability of the Rafay Cloud Automation Platform — the evolution of its Kubernetes Operations Platform — to enable platform teams to deliver automation and self-service capabilities to developers, data scientists and other cloud users.
Bitrise is integrating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide compliance-conscious companies with greater access to CI/CD capabilities for mobile app development.
Armory announced a new unified declarative deployment capability for AWS Lambda.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce announced a significant expansion of their long standing, global strategic partnership, deepening product integrations across data and artificial intelligence (AI), and for the first time offering select Salesforce products on the AWS Marketplace.
Veracode announced product innovations to enhance the developer experience. The new features integrate security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and drive adoption of application security techniques in the environments where developers work.
Couchbase announced a new Capella columnar service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), enabling organizations to harness real-time analytics to build adaptive applications.
Redgate announced the launch of Redgate Test Data Manager, which simplifies the challenges that come with Test Data Management (TDM) and modern software development across multiple databases.
mabl announced an integration with GitLab, the AI-powered DevSecOps platform.
FusionAuth announced the availability of new software development kits (SDKs) that support Angular, React and Vue JavaScript front-end frameworks.
Sauce Labs announced Sauce Visual, adding native visual regression capabilities to its robust testing platform.
Persistent Systems launched an open-source maintenance service to facilitate keeping an organization's open-source software up to date with all patches, bug fixes, and incorporating the latest software releases.
Noname Security announced integrations with leading Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform providers Swimlane, Tines, and Palo Alto Networks.
Red Hat announced an expansion of its investment in the Backstage community with the donation of five new plug-ins, enabling organizations to more quickly and easily integrate capabilities from Azure Container Registry, JFrog Artifactory, Kiali, Nexus and 3scale into their DevOps pipelines.
Bitwarden enhanced the Bitwarden Secrets Manager product by adding self-hosting for new and existing enterprise customers.