Duet AI for Developers presents an AI-powered coding assistance tool seamlessly integrated into your Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This tool empowers developers with features such as code completion, code generation, chat functionality, and Smart Actions—streamlining tasks through one-click shortcuts for repetitive actions, including the creation of unit tests and code explanations.

Compatible with various widely-used Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Cloud Shell Editor, Cloud Workstations, IntelliJ, PyCharm, and Visual Studio Code, this ensures that developers can maintain their flow state. Seroter highlights that this capability allows developers to access all necessary information and assistance seamlessly within their chosen IDE, eliminating the need to switch platforms.

“What I would usually have done as a developer when I start building stuff, because I have the memory of a goldfish at this point, I don’t remember anything, so what do I do? I jump to search results, I jump to Stack Overflow, I troll for blogs, I’m watching a video, I’m doing whatever. And I’m breaking my flow all the time. And so with this, if I can keep you in a flow state longer, everybody wins. And so here I can stay in my IDE and get good answers and get trusted answers and get back to work. I haven’t broken flow”, said Richard Seroter, chief evangelist at Google Cloud.

Currently, it caters to a diverse range of programming languages, surpassing 20, such as C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Google has successfully collaborated with more than 25 industry partners, including Confluent, Datadog, HashiCorp, JetBrains, and MongoDB, to enhance the solution with integrations and features.

Additionally, the company announced a forthcoming upgrade for all Duet AI services to leverage Gemini in the next few weeks.

To encourage adoption, Duet AI for Developers will be available for free until February 1, 2024, after which it will transition to a subscription-based model.

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management, part of the AIOps Platform from Broadcom, delivers mobile-to mainframe observability for user behaviour, performance analysis, and code-level diagnostics along with easy-to-use workflows and dashboards to understand the health of any multi-cloud app. The solution provides advanced analytics based on time, text, topology, and training, so you can pinpoint and resolve performance issues quickly.

Akamai provides application performance management as part of its Ion solution, which is a suite of intelligent performance optimizations and controls for delivering high-quality web iOS and Android app experiences. The solution continuously monitors real-user behaviour and adapts in real-time to context, user behaviour and connectivity changes.

AppDynamics by Cisco is an APM provider that provides customers with information on user experience. Its Experience Journey Mapping feature tracks the application paths most common among users and evaluates performance, enabling customers to see how their users are interacting with their app.

Amazon CloudWatch is an application and infrastructure monitoring solution built for DevOps engineers, developers, SREs and IT managers. It provides data and actionable insights to monitor apps, respond to performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

Catchpoint is the enterprise-proven ally that empowers teams with the visibility and insight required to deliver on the digital experience demands of customers and employees. With its combined true synthetic, real user, network, and endpoint monitoring capabilities and the largest, most diverse global monitoring network in the industry, Catchpoint delivers in-depth, accurate, and full-stack performance insights.

Datadog APM provides end-to-end distributed tracing at scale capabilities for front-end devices and databases. Users can monitor service dependencies, reduce latency, and eliminate errors for the best possible user experience.

Dynatrace provides software intelligence to simplify enterprise cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation. With AI and complete automation, our all-in-one platform provides answers, not just data, about the performance of applications, the underlying infrastructure and the experience of all users.

InfluxData: APM can be performed using InfluxData’s platform InfluxDB. InfluxDB is a purpose-built time series database, real-time analytics engine and visualization pane. It is a central platform where all metrics, events, logs and tracking data can be integrated and centrally monitored.

Instana is a fully automatic APM solution that makes it easy to visualize and manage the performance of your business applications and services. The only APM solution built specifically for cloud-native microservice architectures, Instana leverages automation and AI to deliver immediately actionable information to DevOps.

LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that empowers all teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. By separating code deployments from feature releases, LaunchDarkly enables you to deploy faster, reduce risk, and iterate continuously. LaunchDarkly integrates with several observability and APM solutions such as AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace.

Lightstep‘s mission is to deliver insights that put organizations back in control of their complex software applications. It provides an accurate, detailed snapshot of the entire software system at any point in time, enabling organizations to identify bottlenecks and resolve incidents rapidly.

Microsoft Azure Monitor provides full observability into applications, infrastructure and networks. Its application sights feature provides an APM service for developers and DevOps professionals to monitor live applications, detect performance anomalies, diagnose issues and understand what users are doing.

New Relic One aims to go beyond traditional monitoring solutions by embracing observability. It provides users with a real-time view of operational data so they can respond faster, optimize better and build great modern software. It includes a telemetry data platform, full-stack observability, and applied intelligence.

Oracle provides a complete end-to-end application performance management solution for custom and Oracle applications. Oracle Enterprise Manager is designed for both cloud and on-premises deployments; it isolates and diagnoses problems fast, reduces downtime, provides end-to-end visibility; log monitoring; synthetic transaction monitoring and business transaction management and business metrics.

OpsRamp is a modern IT operations management platform that allows enterprise IT teams and MSPs to “control the chaos” of digital infrastructure. OpsRamp does this through hybrid discovery and monitoring, event and incident management, remediation and automation, powered by AIOps. Users can detect and resolve incidents faster, understand resource dependencies and avoid costly performance issues.

OverOps captures code-level insight about application quality in real-time to help DevOps teams deliver reliable software. Operating in any environment, OverOps employs both static and dynamic code analysis to collect unique data about every error and exception as well as performance slowdowns.

Pepperdata is a leader in the APM space with proven products, operational experience, and deep expertise. It provides enterprises with predictable performance, empowered users, managed costs and managed growth for their big data investments, both on-premise and in the cloud.

Plumbr is a modern monitoring solution designed to be used in microservice-ready environments. Using Plumbr, engineering teams can govern microservice application quality by using data from web application performance monitoring. Plumbr unifies the data from infrastructure, applications, and clients to expose the experience of a user.

Riverbed’s application performance solutions provide superior levels of visibility into cloud-native applications—from end-users to microservices, to containers, to infrastructure—to help you dramatically accelerate the application lifecycle from DevOps through production.

SmartBear: AlertSite’s global network of more than 340 monitoring nodes helps monitor the availability and performance of applications and APIs, and find issues before they hit end consumers. The Web transaction recorder DejaClick helps record complex user transactions and turn them into monitors, without requiring any coding.

Splunk APM enables users to innovate faster in the cloud, improve user experience and future-proof applications. It features NoSample full-fidelity trace ingestion so developers never miss an anomaly, AI-driven analytics and directed troubleshooting, high cardinality exploration of traces, and an open standards approach.

Stackify by Netreo’s APM solution Retrace gives developers straightforward insights into performance bottlenecks. It integrates code profiling, error tracking and application logs; troubleshoots problems and looks for ways to optimize code; and collects detailed snap tops of what code is doing and how long it takes.

What does one Lead Site Reliability Engineer do?

Before I talk about what I do as a lead I first what to define what a Site Reliability Engineer is. Site Reliability Engineering(SRE) can mean a lot of different things depending on the company. The SRE team at Kenna is a group of developers that are focused on using software to optimize performance and ensure stability and reliability across all of our systems. When talking with our lead operations engineer, we decided that an SRE is a developer+. The plus stands for some bit of extra knowledge beyond that of just writing code. For me, the plus is my comprehensive understanding of how Elasticsearch works. For others, their plus might be the ability to work seamlessly with a framework like Ansible, or maybe they have a deep understanding of containers. The plus can be almost anything tech related that would help an SRE with their job.

Another trait that I feel characterizes a good SRE, is the ability to look at and understand how an entire system works. It is easy to understand small pieces of a system, but the ability to step back and conceptually understand how all the pieces fit together is key to being an SRE. Having a high level understanding allows us to figure out a system’s weakest points and improve on them to ensure reliability across the entire system.

As the lead of the team I am responsible for not only acting as an SRE myself by writing code but I also get to determine what projects the team will work on based on what would benefit the company and our platform the most.

What technologies/languages do you use & prefer?

My primary and preferred language is Ruby and that is what I have been using for all of my professional career. A lot of people give Ruby a bad rap for being slow, but it has gotten significantly faster recently. Also, how you use it can greatly affect how fast or slow it performs. It is an easy language to learn but like all other coding languages, takes a lifetime to master and really do well.

What project are you currently working on and how many people are in your team?

There are currently 2 other people on my team and we are looking for a 4th. The team itself has a few projects going on.

• • • Upgrading Elasticsearch to 6.x. Our last upgrade was rough, so we have some extensive testing plans associated with this upgrade.
    • Defining service level objectives. Our customers are happy now, but what does that mean in terms of metrics? How fast do we need to load searches to keep customers happy? How fast does data processing need to happen? Our goal is to answer questions like these.
    • Wrangling all our new virtual private cloud(VPC) environments. A lot of our large clients want their own virtual private cloud for running Kenna. This means we have a lot of different environments. As you can imagine, working with all of them and keeping them in sync is a challenge. As our VPC numbers increase this year, my team is hoping to make working across all VPCs as seamless as possible.

Is there a platform, tool, framework etc., in which you see a problem, but keep on using?

That is a GREAT question! I have so many examples of tools we used for the longest time at Kenna and it wasn’t until we got a full time SRE team that we finally replaced them. Each replacement has paid off tremendously! For example, a year ago we were having issues with NewRelic because it was not retaining data long enough to be useful for us. Once the SRE team was formed we took on the task of switching us to Datadog and it was the best decision we ever made. Another example of a tool that was used at Kenna for years and we finally are making the push to get rid of is Resque. Resque is a background processing framework that uses Redis to process and track background jobs. Resque has become very dated and is currently not very performant for our use case so we recently have made a push to move all our background jobs to a new framework called Sidekiq. Sidekiq is very well maintained, constantly coming out with new features, and is much more performant than Resque. Looking ahead, the next system that will likely get replaced is our CI solution CircleCI. As we scale it has gotten tremendously more expensive and we are on the hunt for a more practical solution.

You’re currently trying Ansible. Why did you choose to start this journey & what are the benefits of this tool?  

3 years ago our Operations team made the switch from Chef to Ansible for managing all of our infrastructure. Now that I am an SRE I work a lot more with the Operations team so I have made it a point to learn more about Ansible so I can better understand what they do. It is also great to have another tool in my toolbox that I can use when it comes to building SRE features. Even though I am new to Ansible, I have found that understanding it at a high level and what it is doing is very easy. It gives you the ability to run commands on multiple servers which is incredibly convenient and powerful when you are working and managing a lot of infrastructure.

What is the use of Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is at the cornerstone of Kenna’s platform and is used extensively for comprehensive searching of a company’s assets and vulnerabilities. Elasticsearch is actually the reason I ended up becoming an SRE. When I joined Kenna no one had taken ownership over it so I decided to step up and learn everything I could about it. Becoming proficient in Elasticsearch and working a lot with it to improve performance and stability made the transition from Software Engineer to Site Reliability Engineer very natural. Elasticsearch is a great tool for when you have a lot of data that needs to be searched in complex ways very quickly. It is what allows Kenna to stand apart from its competitors because no one else offers the kind of search speed that we do.

My desk if you are looking for inspiration! Big fan of my Pop head figures and my Educated Guess wine bottle with sunflower 🌻 oh yeah and there’s the Tito’s 😅 pic.twitter.com/BQhJOKcch7

— Molly Struve 🦄 (@molly_struve) May 16, 2019

What’s the hardest tech task that you’ve encountered?

Oh man, it is so hard to pick just one. Usually what is hard at the time, I look back a few months later and it seems so easy. I think the hardest part of my job in general is debugging a performance issue. For example, if a server crashes that is running our application it is usually my job to figure out why. Figuring out the why involves combing through lots of logs and data and trying to piece together what exactly the server was doing at the time it crashed. Once I have figured out what it was doing, then I have to take my best guess at which task caused it to crash. Putting all the pieces together involves a lot of problem solving and having the ability to step back and really look at the big picture of how everything is running together. It also involves a bit of trial and error. Sometimes the cause is not easy to deduce and I have to take my best guess at fixing it. Sometimes it takes a couple of fixes before I finally solve the root cause of the problem.

Is there any question that every Lead Site Reliability Engineer should know the answer to?

One strategy that I read about in Google’s SRE book that I think is paramount to being a good SRE is when a system breaks the first thing you should always do is work on getting the system back online. Sometimes as a SRE we immediately want to know WHY it happened. We need to fight the urge to figure out why until after we have the system back online.

What’s your motivational phrase that keeps your code running?  😉

Fail forward! This is a saying that our VP of Engineering has instilled in our culture at Kenna and has really hit home with me. Anytime we find ourselves with broken code or an upgrade gone bad we always try to push forward. The mantra also reminds me that it’s ok to fail sometimes, but when you do, keep moving forward. Don’t ever let failure send you retreating backwards.

Ooof, might be time to call it for the day 😅

But if I am being honest, I won’t until those specs run green pic.twitter.com/LiFoD2URmW

— Molly Struve 🦄 (@molly_struve) June 20, 2019