![]() ![]() This slide is here to tell you that the rest of this talk is going to be a little bit all over the place. ![]() Here's a map with a very convoluted path. It's much less of a headache at that point when security work. If you find a problem, you can fix it, the resulting code will run faster, cheaper, and eat less energy. The advantage of doing performance work is it's got all the technical interestingness of security work. Usually, nobody is happy about this, because security is a cost center and interferes with the rest of the business. Or you need to be prepared to be the bearer of bad news to an organization and tell them, can you please fix this? You've got the choice of selling the security problem that you found to the highest bidder, which then risks getting somebody killed and dismembered in some embassy somewhere. In the security realm, if you find a security problem, you've got to pick your path. In both situations, you end up analyzing very large-scale legacy code bases. All of that is relevant for the overall goal, meaning security or insecurity on the one hand, and performance on the other hand. ![]() The interesting thing here is both are full stack computer science, meaning in both cases, you get to look at the high-level design of systems, you get to look at the low-level implementation details. My personal path goes from essentially spy versus spy security to performance engineering. I prefer not to work on scarcity, and I prefer not to work on human versus human zero-sum games. Lastly, it's ideologically aligned because I'm working on abundance, meaning I'm trying to generate the same amount of output for society with fewer inputs, which is something that aligns with my personal value set. It tends to be economically viable because if I make things more efficient, I save people money, and they're usually willing to pay for that. One of the things that I really like about performance work is, it tends to be technically interesting, because it's full stack computer science. Why Care About Performance? (Personal Reasons)Īside from the business reasons, what are personal reasons why anybody would care about performance? For me, throughout my entire career, there's always been the issue that was difficult for me to align what I found technically interesting, what I found economically viable, and align that with what I found ideologically aligned with my values. You can see in this slide that there's a reasonably linear relationship between gross margins and company valuations for SaaS businesses, which means improving your gross margins will add multiple of your revenue to your overall company valuation. Lastly, I mentioned gross margins and company valuation. We can see that the cost per unit is just not falling at the same rate that it used to fall anymore. Here's a diagram that shows the relative cost per unit per transistor over the different process nodes in chip manufacturing. With the cost of AI, and so forth, this is only going to continue in the next years. Efficiency is becoming really important again. Lastly, the move from on-premise hardware to cloud, where as you go into a pay as you go scheme, if you find a clever way of optimizing your computing stack, you realize savings literally the next day.Īll of these things are coming together to push performance from something that was a bit of a nerdy niche subject back into the limelight. The second one is the move from on-premise software to SaaS, where the cost of computing is now borne by the vendor of services and the vendor of digital goods, which means computational efficiency, which used to be borne by the customer is nowadays paid for by the provider, which means inefficiency cuts straight into gross margins, and through that into company valuations. The first one is the death of the economic version of Moore's law, which means that new hardware does not necessarily come with a commensurate speedup anymore as it used to in the past. Why would anybody care about performance? First off, there's three economic trends or three macro trends that are really conspiring to make performance and efficiency important again. ![]() Welcome to my talk, adventures in performance, where I'll talk about all the interesting things I've learned in recent years after switching my career from spy versus spy security work, to performance work. Thomas Dullien: My name is Thomas Dullien. ![]()
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