Computing Performance 2022: What's on the Horizon

The constant drive for faster computing performance introduces new hardware and software components for the SRE team to manage, observe, monitor, alert, and consider for capacity planning. This session tours the current state for major technologies, discussing performance improvements underway that you may soon be adopting and managing. Topics include processors (including 3D stacking and cloud vendor CPUs), memory (including DDR5 and HBM), disks (including 3D Xpoint), networking (including QUIC and XDP), hypervisors (including lightweight VMs: Firecracker and Cloud Hypervisor), AI-based auto tuning, and more. The future of performance is increasingly cloud-based, with hardware hypervisors and custom processors, observability down to cycle stalls (even as cloud guests), high-speed syscall-avoiding applications (eBPF, FPGAs, and io_uring), and AI-based auto tuning. This session provides ideas for improving performance, reducing latency, and meeting SLOs, and also provides opinions from a performance engineering expert with predictions for the future.