How New Relic Develops Language Angents Speaker: Belinda Runkle, VP of Engineering, New Relic

1. How New Relic
Builds Language Agents
Belinda Runkle, VP of Engineering, APM
@BelindaRunkle

2. This document and the information herein (including any information that may be incorporated by reference) is provided
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Any information provided hereby is proprietary to New Relic and may not be replicated or disclosed without New Relic’s
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Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of
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information provided.

3. VP of Engineering, APM
4+ years product engineering for agents
Launched Go, Node.js agents
@belindarunkle
Hi, I’m Belinda

4. 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

5. 10 lessons
learned from
building agents
for the future
stacks

6. #1 - Pay attention to
what your developers
are talking about

7. gopher by Renee French is licensed under CC3.0

8. 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

9. 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)

10. #2 - Use constraints to
inspire innovation

11. Good architecture
means having some
rules.

12. Confidential ©2008-16 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. 12
NR Architecture Note #128

13. Rules are constraints.
Constraints inspire
innovation.

14. Confidential ©2008-16 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. 14
NR Architecture Note #128

15. 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

16. #3 - Encourage
experimentation
(including failures)

17. All it takes is
one curious
engineerCurious Cat by Captain Pancakes is licensed under CC2.0

18. “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

19. #4 - Rapidly mature by
reducing cycle time

22. #5 - It’s OK to ask for
help

23. Developing the Node.js agent

24. #6 - Accept that you will
lose some bets

25. 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

26. #7 - Time with
customers is worth 10x
coding time.

28. 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

29. Go Agent beta in Slack
Real-time feedback
from Go Agent beta
customers straight to
the engineering team

30. #8 - Use data to know
where to focus

31. Job listings
Data source: Indeed (www.indeed.com)

32. RedMonk analysis of Github and
Stack Overflow
Data source: Redmonk (www.redmonk,com)
▪ JavaScript
▪ Java
▪ PHP
▪ Python
▪ C#
▪ C++
▪ Ruby
▪ CSS
▪ C
▪ Objective-C

33. 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%

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

35. Customer requests on our forum

36. #9 - Curate every new-
stack experience

37. Goroutines page

38. Browser Agent for single page apps
JS logo by Chris Williams licensed under WTFPL

39. #10 - Always have
something simmering

40. 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

41. Questions?

42. Thank you.
Belinda Runkle, VP of Engineering, APM
@BelindaRunkle