9 Books by P99 CONF 2022 Speakers: Go, SLOs, eBPF, Databases & More

Editor’s Note: P99 CONF 2022 is now a wrap! You can (re)watch all videos and access the decks now.

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If you’ve seen the P99 CONF agenda, you know that the stars have aligned nicely this year. In just two half days, from anywhere you like, you can learn from 40+ outstanding speakers – all sharing performance insights from a broad range of perspectives. Front-end/back-end. Go/Rust/C#/Java/WebAssembly. SQL/NoSQL. Linux Kernel/DPDK. Servers/Micro-Frontends…

As we were posting their bios, we noticed – not surprisingly – that our speakers have amassed a rather impressive list of publications, including quite a few books. This blog highlights 9 of those P99 speaker books, which we highly encourage you to read.

 

Efficient Go: Data-Driven Performance Optimization

By Bartlomiej Plotka  January 2023

Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly

Software engineers today typically put performance optimizations low on the list of development priorities. But despite significant technological advancements and lower-priced hardware, software efficiency still matters. With this book, Go programmers will learn how to approach performance topics for applications written in this open source language.

How and when should you apply performance efficiency optimization without wasting your time? Author Bartlomiej Plotka provides the tools and knowledge you need to make your system faster using fewer resources. Once you learn how to address performance in your Go applications, you’ll be able to bring small but effective habits to your programming and development cycle.

This book shows you how to:

• Continuously monitor for performance and efficiency regressions
• Find the root cause of performance bottlenecks using metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling
• Use tools like pprof, go test, benchstat and k6.io to create reliable micro- and macro-benchmarks
• Improve and optimize your code to meet your goals without sacrificing simplicity and readability
• Make data-driven decisions by prioritizing changes that make a difference
• Introduce basic “performance hygiene” in day-to-day Go programming and testing

Bartlomiej Plotka is presenting “Clouds are Not Free: Guide to Observability-Driven Efficiency Optimizations” at P99 CONF.

 

Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence

By Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda June 2022

Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly | Honeycomb

Observability is critical for building, changing, and understanding the software that powers complex modern systems. Teams that adopt observability are much better equipped to ship code swiftly and confidently, identify outliers and aberrant behaviors, and understand the experience of each and every user. This practical book explains the value of observable systems and shows you how to practice observability-driven development.

Authors Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda from Honeycomb explain what constitutes good observability, show you how to improve upon what you’re doing today, and provide practical dos and don’ts for migrating from legacy tooling, such as metrics, monitoring, and log management. You’ll also learn the impact observability has on organizational culture (and vice versa).

You’ll explore:

• How the concept of observability applies to managing software at scale
• The value of practicing observability when delivering complex cloud native applications and systems
• The impact observability has across the entire software development lifecycle
• How and why different functional teams use observability with service-level objectives
• How to instrument your code to help future engineers understand the code you wrote today
• How to produce quality code for context-aware system debugging and maintenance
• How data-rich analytics can help you debug elusive issues

Charity Majors is presenting “Performance Tuning with Precision” at P99 CONF.

 

What is eBPF?

By Liz Rice  April 2022

O’Reilly | Isovalent

In just the past few years, the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) has gone from relative obscurity to one of the hottest technology areas in modern infrastructure computing. With this report, Liz Rice dives into eBPF and explains how this framework enables networking, security, and observability tooling for modern compute environments. SREs, ops engineers, and engineering team leads will learn what eBPF is and why it’s so powerful.

Rice, chief open source officer at Isovalent, shows you how to load and run custom eBPF programs within the kernel of your operating system, modifying the way the kernel behaves. You’ll learn what’s required to build eBPF-enabled tools, and why eBPF has become so prevalent in such a short period of time.

With this report, you will:

• Learn why the ability to dynamically change the kernel behavior is so useful, and how eBPF is a game-changer when it comes to making kernel changes
• See what’s involved in writing eBPF code with a programming example to understand how the process works
• Explore an overview of eBPF-enabled tools that you can use to instrument your cloud native applications

Liz Rice is presenting “Using eBPF for High-Performance Networking in Cilium” at P99 CONF.

 

Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects

By Leandro Melendez September 2021

Amazon | AbeBooks

Here comes the book that will help everyone who always wanted to learn, understand, and deliver load test projects.

You will be guided through every phase and sub phase of a traditional load testing project. Holding your hand at every step of the journey, explaining what you should do, the required items, how to gather them, and how to use them.

All explained through fun examples that will help you understand all the complicated technical terms. They will be useful analogies to explain the work to management (or learn it if you are a manager). Each paired up with a translation into the technical boring terms, so you can learn and use the official lingo.

Leandro Melendez is presenting “Continuous Performance from Load Testing to SRE and Beyond” at P99 CONF.

 

Implementing Service Level Objectives

By Alex Hidalgo September 2020

Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly

Although service-level objectives (SLOs) continue to grow in importance, there’s a distinct lack of information about how to implement them. Practical advice that does exist usually assumes that your team already has the infrastructure, tooling, and culture in place. In this book, recognized SLO expert Alex Hidalgo explains how to build an SLO culture from the ground up.

Ideal as a primer and daily reference for anyone creating both the culture and tooling necessary for SLO-based approaches to reliability, this guide provides detailed analysis of advanced SLO and service-level indicator (SLI) techniques. Armed with mathematical models and statistical knowledge to help you get the most out of an SLO-based approach, you’ll learn how to build systems capable of measuring meaningful SLIs with buy-in across all departments of your organization.

• Define SLIs that meaningfully measure the reliability of a service from a user’s perspective
• Choose appropriate SLO targets, including how to perform statistical and probabilistic analysis
• Use error budgets to help your team have better discussions and make better data-driven decisions
• Build supportive tooling and resources required for an SLO-based approach
• Use SLO data to present meaningful reports to leadership and your users

Alex Hidalgo is presenting “Throw Away Your Nines” at P99 CONF.

 

Container Security: Fundamental Technology Concepts that Protect Containerized Applications

By Liz Rice April 2020

Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly

To facilitate scalability and resilience, many organizations now run applications in cloud native environments using containers and orchestration. But how do you know if the deployment is secure? This practical book examines key underlying technologies to help developers, operators, and security professionals assess security risks and determine appropriate solutions.

Author Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, looks at how the building blocks commonly used in container-based systems are constructed in Linux. You’ll understand what’s happening when you deploy containers and learn how to assess potential security risks that could affect your deployments. If you run container applications with kubectl or docker and use Linux command-line tools such as ps and grep, you’re ready to get started.

• Explore attack vectors that affect container deployments
• Dive into the Linux constructs that underpin containers
• Examine measures for hardening containers
• Understand how misconfigurations can compromise container isolation
• Learn best practices for building container images
• Identify container images that have known software vulnerabilities
• Leverage secure connections between containers
• Use security tooling to prevent attacks on your deployment

Liz Rice is presenting “Using eBPF for High-Performance Networking in Cilium” at P99 CONF.

 

Database Reliability Engineering

By Laine Campbell and Charity Majors November 2017

Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly

The infrastructure-as-code revolution in IT is also affecting database administration. With this practical book, developers, system administrators, and junior to mid-level DBAs will learn how the modern practice of site reliability engineering applies to the craft of database architecture and operations. Authors Laine Campbell and Charity Majors provide a framework for professionals looking to join the ranks of today’s database reliability engineers (DBRE).

You’ll begin by exploring core operational concepts that DBREs need to master. Then you’ll examine a wide range of database persistence options, including how to implement key technologies to provide resilient, scalable, and performant data storage and retrieval. With a firm foundation in database reliability engineering, you’ll be ready to dive into the architecture and operations of any modern database.

This book covers:

• Service-level requirements and risk management
• Building and evolving an architecture for operational visibility
• Infrastructure engineering and infrastructure management
• How to facilitate the release management process
• Data storage, indexing, and replication
• Identifying datastore characteristics and best use cases
• Datastore architectural components and data-driven architectures

Charity Majors is presenting “Performance Tuning with Precision” at P99 CONF.

 

Containerize Your Go Code

By Liz Rice April 2017

O’Reilly

This report shows how Go programmers can build small, efficient containers for their Go code. It explains what’s inside a container image and walks you through how to build and run containers for your Go projects.

You’ll learn how to containerize the Go code you’re working on, with worked examples to show you exactly what to do. You’ll see how to build a container from the scratch image, and why that’s a good idea for Go code. You’ll also learn how to set up port bindings so that the outside work can connect to the code running in your container, and how to pass in configuration environment variables.

Liz Rice is presenting “Using eBPF for High-Performance Networking in Cilium” at P99 CONF.

 

High Performance MySQL

By Peter Zaitsev April 2012
Amazon | O’Reilly

How can you bring out MySQL’s full power? With High Performance MySQL, you’ll learn advanced techniques for everything from designing schemas, indexes, and queries to tuning your MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. This guide also teaches you safe and practical ways to scale applications through replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover.

Updated to reflect recent advances in MySQL and InnoDB performance, features, and tools, this third edition not only offers specific examples of how MySQL works, it also teaches you why this system works as it does, with illustrative stories and case studies that demonstrate MySQL’s principles in action. With this book, you’ll learn how to think in MySQL.

• Learn the effects of new features in MySQL 5.5, including stored procedures, partitioned databases, triggers, and views
• Implement improvements in replication, high availability, and clustering
• Achieve high performance when running MySQL in the cloud
• Optimize advanced querying features, such as full-text searches
• Take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs and solid-state disks
• Explore backup and recovery strategies – including new tools for hot online backups

Peter Zaitsev is presenting “A Deep Dive into Query Performance” at P99 CONF.