Software Performance Engineering

This book introduces the concept of Software Performance Engineering throughout the development process. Software performance yields from a wide range of factors: from hardware through coding standards, runtime frameworks, design patterns, quality assurance and testing, and system architectural patterns, to name a few. This book takes a holistic view of the entire software development lifecycle, learning each of its phases, to understand the technologies, techniques, and tools available, and how we can use them to improve the behavior and performance of our system.

Technical hands-on chapters introduce tools and libraries, showing practical examples of how to set them up and use them with ease, while theoretical chapters include comprehensive information and deep explanations of a broad selection of concepts, all accompanied by relevant charts, screenshots, and code samples. Key sections cover performance monitoring design using tools like OpenTelemetry, detailed code profiling techniques, and best practices for performance testing and test data management. You will also learn about the performance benchmarking types, KPIs/metrics analysis, and behavioral correlation.

Upon completing this book, you will possess the practical skills to proactively integrate performance into every development stage, diagnose complex issues, and manage system performance effectively post-production. Code snippets are mainly written in Python, as the book focuses on current technologies, delving into concepts of cloud computing, design patterns, and best practices, in order to learn how to optimize the entire software delivery process, end-to-end.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
* Define performance requirements, metrics, and KPIs.
* Useful design patterns and bad practices to avoid.
* Utilize cloud services for performance.
* Tools for optimizing code and testing.
* Live telemetry, monitoring, measuring, dashboarding, and predicting.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for performance engineers, software developers, QA engineers, and solution architects aiming to identify bottlenecks and optimize application performance. Readers will benefit from prior knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, and basic non-functional engineering concepts.

1. Introduction to Performance Engineering
2. Performance Driven Development
3. Non-functional Requirements Definition and Tracking
4. Workload Modeling and Projection
5. High Performance Design Patterns
6. Performance Antipatterns
7. Performance in the Clouds
8. Designing Performance Monitoring
9. Tools and Techniques for Code Profiling
10. Performance Testing, Checklist to Best Practices
11. Test Data Management
12. Performance Benchmarking
13. Golden Signals, KPI, Metrics, and Tools
14. Performance Behavioral Correlation
15. Post-Production Management

Alon Rotem is a soulful geek and musician. His encounters with code go back to his teenage years in the mid-1980s, where he discovered the ATARI 800 8-bit computers and the BASIC programming language. His days in the actual tech industry, all around software engineering, go back to the mid-1990s, the days of DOS, Windows 3.1, and prehistoric Red Hat distributions.

Since then, he has worked as a quality assurance engineer, a software engineer, a lecturer, an educational manager, a solutions consultant, a team lead, a tech lead, a solution enterprise architect and a senior engineer at one of the most well-known database companies, the MariaDB Foundation. He has been managing a team of software architects for one of the big four global accounting companies, KPMG. He also established and created a certification program for one of the biggest enterprise-level content management systems, Sitefinity, being one of the senior engineers who had built it firsthand for the most successful Bulgarian software company, Telerik.

Apart from his work, he is an active hacker and developer, always exploring technological solutions, workarounds, free alternatives, and hacks, and is an avid supporter of Linux and open-source software.

He studied computer science at the Open University of Israel, and in recent years has been living and working on both ends of East and West Europe.

He is also an electro-acoustic musician whose works can be found on all major streaming platforms, as well as on his personal site.