Alexander PodelkoSenior Performance Engineer @ Amazon Web Services

Continuous Performance Testing: Challenges and Approaches

The way we develop software is changing – and performance engineering is changing too to remain relevant. Integrating into agile development (shift-left / continuous performance testing) is not an option anymore when performance risks need to be mitigated. Automation and Continuous Integration (CI) become necessary as we get to multiple iterations and shrinking times to verify performance. However, continuous performance testing may be implemented in many different ways and on different levels depending on specific context: what we need to test, how high are performance risks / costs of failure, what technologies we use, etc. There are numerous challenges – and there are different ways to address them. We will discuss several approaches on specific examples – from light-weight solutions to full-scale implementations.

Alex Podelko is a senior performance engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), responsible for performance testing and optimization of Amazon Aurora. He has specialized in performance since 1997, working in different performance-related roles for MongoDB, Oracle/Hyperion, Aetna, and Intel before joining AWS. Alex periodically talks and writes about performance-related topics, advocating tearing down silo walls between different groups of performance professionals. His recent talks and articles could be found at https://www.alexanderpodelko.com/Bio.html . He currently serves as a board director for the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) https://cmg.org/ and a member of the SPEC Research Group Steering Committee https://research.spec.org/ .