How New Relic Builds Language Agents

Belinda Runkle, VP of Engineering, APM @BelindaRunkle

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VP of Engineering, APM4+ years product engineering for agentsLaunched Go, Node.js agents @belindarunkle

Hi, I’m Belinda

Agents

gopher by Renee French is licensed under CC3.0

Java image licensed under Apache

elephant licensed by El Rubio under GPL

Node.js is a trademark of Joyent, Inc. and is used with its permission

Ruby logo by Yukihiro Matsumoto is licensed under CC-SA-2.5

Python logo licensed under CC-SA-3.0

10 lessons learned from building agents for the future stacks

#1 - Pay attention to what your developers

are talking about

gopher by Renee French is licensed under CC3.0

gopher by Renee French is licensed under CC3.0

Docker and the Docker logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Docker, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Docker, Inc. and other parties may also have trademark rights in other terms used herein

new PHP daemon in Go

▪ Version 5.0 in released over a year ago included a new Go-based daemon

▪ Daemon was re-architected to allow for better performance, easier cross-platform compatibility, and overall maintenance simplicity

▪ Developers loved writing Go (vs. C)

#2 - Use constraints to inspire innovation

Good architecture means having some

rules.

Confidential ©2008-16 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved.   12

NR Architecture Note #128

Rules are constraints. Constraints inspire

innovation.

Confidential ©2008-16 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved.   14

NR Architecture Note #128

First Go agent(s)

▪ Dev teams <3 Go.▪ Build an agent to make their Go service

acceptable in production.▪ These new agents and plugins become future

products in some cases.▪ We had at least 3 engineers try writing a

lightweight Go agent.

gopher by Renee French is licensed under CC3.0

#3 - Encourage experimentation

(including failures)

All it takes is one curious

engineerCurious Cat by Captain Pancakes is licensed under CC2.0

“What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

by Carrigg Photography for the Wikimedia Foundation – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

– Ward Cunningham

#4 - Rapidly mature by reducing cycle time

#5 - It’s OK to ask for help

Developing the Node.js agent

#6 - Accept that you will lose some bets

Whatever happened to that HHVM agent?

▪ HHVM promising early start

▪ Radically faster performance than PHP5+

▪ Wordpress, Drupal, others adopting

▪ But HHVM was massive reworking of PHP internals, and thus broke our PHP agent in some fundamental places

▪ And eventually… PHP7 launched! With similar performance gains!

▪ Building in support for PHP7 was much easier

#7 - Time with customers is worth 10x

coding time.

How engineers typically engage with customers

▪ our forums▪ requests made via our account teams▪ support tickets▪ user interviews and ride-alongs▪ meetups and conferences▪ open-source and community events▪ Github

Go Agent beta in Slack

Real-time feedback from Go Agent beta customers straight to the engineering team

#8 - Use data to know where to focus

Job listings

Data source: Indeed (www.indeed.com)

RedMonk analysis of Github and Stack Overflow

Data source: Redmonk (www.redmonk,com)

▪ JavaScript▪ Java▪ PHP▪ Python▪ C#▪ C++

▪ Ruby▪ CSS▪ C▪ Objective-C

Stack Overflow survey

Data source: Stack Overflow survey (http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

▪ Rust: 79.1%▪ Swift: 72.1%▪ F#: 70.7%▪ Scala: 69.4%▪ Go: 68.7%▪ Clojure: 66.7%

▪ React: 66.0%▪ Haskell: 64.7%▪ Python: 62.5%▪ C#: 62.0%▪ Node.js: 59.6%

Relative comparisons

Data source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)

Customer requests on our forum

#9 - Curate every new-stack experience

Goroutines page

Browser Agent for single page apps

JS logo by Chris Williams licensed under WTFPL

#10 - Always have something simmering

What our developers talk about

New Relic developers talk about Elixir, Rust,

Kotlin

Microsoft has done major work with CoreCLR

Deeper insight into

Node internals

More extensible agents – Improved

Agent APIs

Cloud service

integration

Questions?

Thank you.

Belinda Runkle, VP of Engineering, APM @BelindaRunkle