In this episode, we're diving deep into the world of performance engineering with our esteemed guest, Dylan van Iersel, an experienced IT consultant and co-founder of Perfana. We'll explore the intricate relationship between software performance and business outcomes and how tools like Perfana can democratize and simplify the process of performance testing. Performance is more than just a technical concern; it has direct implications for customer satisfaction and the bottom line. Dylan illuminates the importance of integrating performance testing within the CI/CD pipeline, using Perfana to serve as a quality gate and provide actionable insights through automated analysis and dashboard visualizations. We'll also discuss the evolution of performance engineering in a cloud-native, containerized landscape, the challenges of scaling performance testing across agile teams, and why the "shift left" approach in identifying issues early is crucial for today's development processes. For teams looking to embrace performance testing, Dylan introduces Perfana's starter package and emphasizes the ease of getting up and running, even on a local laptop, as a foundation for more extensive integration into test environments and CI/CD pipelines. For our listeners interested in cutting-edge developments, we dive into how Perfana innovates with data science and machine learning to enhance anomaly detection and root cause analysis. Plus, we'll get into the nitty-gritty of why observability, while important, shouldn't be your sole resource for performance testing. Listen to discover actionable advice and insights on improving your team's performance engineering efforts if you want to learn more about Perfana to try their free trial now!