Adding more hardware was the last decade's number one performance tuning trick. But, these times are gone because energy costs are on the rise, and the chip shortage is increasing system infrastructure spending.
These days, optimizing IT services for speed, throughput, and lower system resource consumption is essential for many forward-thinking businesses. On a side note, even some car drivers in Europe realize that wearing the Performetriks bumper sticker increases speed and reduces fuel consumption dramatically.
The promise of the Cloud
As for performance engineers, we try to open the eyes of our customers and show them how their new or changed IT system is working under real-world usage conditions. We make performance engineering part of our customer's value streams and guide them to develop applications for speed and reliability. The earlier we learn about performance glitches, the easier such problems are to repair.
You won't believe how often teams try to overcome speed problems by simply adding more powerful hardware. Unfortunately, in Cloud-first environments, we are often blinded by the endless infrastructure capacity, and we see ramping up infrastructure as the preferred tuning approach.
The promise of the Cloud is more flexibility. First, however, we must keep the economic footprint in our minds. Second, we will be mistaken if we assume that the magic of the Cloud is a universal cure against all reliability problems.
Solve problems at the root
You will never be able to fix coding and configuration-related performance issues by scaling or adding more or better hardware. Put yourself in the shoes of a house builder and imagine if your basement would be on shaky ground. What would happen to your building? Would it change something if you added a second and third floor or an enormous roof?
I don't think so! The chances are that your basement will collapse, and the entire building will crash down.
But when it comes to IT, we are ignoring these apparent things. We are adding more prominent roofs instead of improving the groundwork. Maybe it's because we can't see these problems in IT systems very quickly.
We, performance engineers, have a trained eye for such mistakes because detecting and guiding teams on how to improve applications is our bread and butter.
Happy Performance Engineering & keep up the great work!