The Past, Present, and Future of Performance Engineering

Performance engineering has never been static. From the early days of mainframes and transaction processing to distributed systems, cloud computing, agile development, and DevOps, performance professionals have repeatedly had to adapt to changes in how software is built and operated.

Artificial Intelligence is now accelerating that transformation once again.This talk looks at the evolution of performance engineering through three lenses: what changed in the past, what is changing today, and what those changes may tell us about the future.

We will examine how cloud, DevOps, and AI are reshaping performance practices, where traditional approaches are becoming less effective, and how the boundaries between development, operations, observability, and performance engineering are increasingly blurred.Finally, we will explore what this means for performance engineers themselves. Which responsibilities may disappear or be automated? Which new ones will emerge? And what skills will performance professionals need as performance engineering continues to evolve? The future is not set in stone, but the patterns of the past may offer useful clues about where the discipline is heading.

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. He currently serves as a member of the SPEC Research Group Steering Committee.

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