New Relic and Agentic DevOps with Nic Benders
Observability emerged from the need to understand complex software systems, and involves tracking metrics, logs, and traces so engineers can detect and diagnose problems before they affect users. However, modern applications often encompass hundreds of services, containers, and dependencies, generating more observability data than dashboards and alerts alone can effectively surface.
New Relic is a leading observability platform, with a history that spans the full arc of modern software operations. Today they are working to apply AI to move observability beyond passive monitoring toward active intelligence, where systems can surface what matters, reduce alert noise, and ultimately take autonomous action before problems reach engineers or users.
Nic Benders is the Chief Technology Strategist at New Relic, where he has worked for 16 years. In this episode, Nic joins Lee Atchison to discuss the evolution of observability from dashboards and alerts to AI-driven intelligence, how LLMs and statistical tools work together to surface meaningful signals from massive datasets, the emerging challenge of observing AI systems themselves, and what the rise of AI means for the future of software engineering as a profession.
This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His best-selling book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments.
Lee is the host of his podcast, Modern Digital Business, an engaging and informative podcast produced for people looking to build and grow their digital business with the help of modern applications and processes developed for today’s fast-moving business environment. Listen at mdb.fm. Follow Lee at softwarearchitectureinsights.com, and see all his content at leeatchison.com.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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GitLab CEO on why AI isn't helping enterprise ship code faster
AI coding assistants are boosting developer productivity, but most enterprises aren’t shipping software any faster. GitLab CEO Bill Staples says the reason is simple: coding was never the main bottleneck. After speaking with more than 60 customers, Staples found that developers spend only 10–20% of their time writing code. The remaining 80–90% is consumed by reviews, CI/CD pipelines, security scans, compliance checks, and deployment—areas that remain largely unautomated. Faster code generation only worsens downstream queues.
GitLab’s response is its newly GA’ed Duo Agent Platform, designed to automate the full software development lifecycle. The platform introduces “agent flows,” multi-step orchestrations that can take work from issue creation through merge requests, testing, and validation. Staples argues that context is the key differentiator. Unlike standalone coding tools that only see local code, GitLab’s all-in-one platform gives agents access to issues, epics, pipeline history, security data, and more through a unified knowledge graph.
Staples believes this platform approach, rather than fragmented point solutions, is what will finally unlock enterprise software delivery at scale.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around GitLab and AI:
GitLab Launches Its AI Agent Platform in Public Beta
GitLab’s Field CTO Predicts: When DevSecOps Meets AI
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Scaling Agentic Inference Across Heterogeneous Compute with Zain Asgar - #757
In this episode, Zain Asgar, co-founder and CEO of Gimlet Labs, joins us to discuss the heterogeneous AI inference across diverse hardware. Zain argues that the current industry standard of running all AI workloads on high-end GPUs is unsustainable for agents, which consume significantly more tokens than traditional LLM applications. We explore Gimlet’s approach to heterogeneous inference, which involves disaggregating workloads across a mix of hardware—from H100s to older GPUs and CPUs—to optimize unit economics without sacrificing performance. We dive into their "three-layer cake" architecture: workload disaggregation, a compilation layer that maps models to specific hardware targets, and a novel system that uses LLMs to autonomously rewrite and optimize compute kernels. Finally, we discuss the complexities of networking in heterogeneous environments, the trade-offs between numerical precision and application accuracy, and the future of hardware-aware scheduling.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/757.
Revealing the unknown unknowns in your software
Ryan welcomes Nic Benders to discuss the complexity and abstraction crisis in software development, the importance of going beyond observability into understandability, and demystifying AI's opacity for understanding and control.
Episode notes:
New Relic is a full-stack observability platform that helps engineers plan, build, deploy, and run software. Read their 2025 observability forecast.
Connect with Nic on Linkedin or email him at nic@newrelic.com.
Congratulations to user Yochai Timmer for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Reader/Writer Locks in C++.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
GitLab’s CEO on Why the Next Great Developer Might Not Write Code | Bill Staples
Bill Staples has spent 30 years redefining how the world writes, ships, and secures code.
On this week’s Grit, the GitLab CEO shares what it takes to lead a public, all-remote DevSecOps company trusted by more than half of the Fortune 100.
He breaks down the discipline of managing energy instead of hours, why weekly operating cadences beat quarterly plans, and how AI will 10× software engineers by auto-debugging code and closing security gaps.
Guest: Bill Staples, CEO of GitLab
Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:42 Introduction
02:34 True joy in life
08:16 Winning teams
13:53 When the energy isn’t there
18:00 Super ambitious
21:01 It’s not just technology
29:27 Elevating quality and standard
41:36 Lifelong collaborator
51:22 Competent intelligence
54:22 Structuring goals and time
1:03:59 Who GitLab is hiring
1:04:17 What “grit” means to Bill
1:04:54 Outro
Links:
Connect with Bill
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
X
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox
Ishan Mukherjee is the Co-Founder/CEO of Rox, a Sequoia-backed AI-powered sales productivity platform. Before Rox, he was the Chief Growth Officer at New Relic where he scaled the self-serve business from $0-$100M in ARR. Prior to New Relic, Ishan founded Pixie Labs (acq by New Relic). Before that he led product at Siri Knowledge Graph at Apple, Lattice Data (acquired by Apple), Premise Data, and Amazon Robotics. Ishan was also an early engineer in Kiva (acquired by Amazon) where he joined after graduating from MIT.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
04:50 Biggest Lessons Scaling New Relic's PLG to $100M in ARR
05:59 How to Do PLG and Enterprise at the Same Time
07:00 How to do Content in a PLG World
08:50 Performance Marketing or Organic Content: What Works for PLG
10:27 Why You Should Stop Marketing at Events
11:47 Why SEM is a Cartel
14:15 Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS
17:17 How AI Changes the World of Enterprise Sales: Commit-Based vs. Usage-Based
20:49 How to do Sales Compensation Plans
24:44 How to Ramp New Sales Reps
25:03 The Impact of AI on Sales Research
29:18 How to do Deep Customer Research in an AI World
35:56 Changing Spending Patterns in SaaS
41:41 Retention and Churn in Enterprise AI
43:31 The Future of Sales Teams with AI
44:45 Hiring and Scaling Sales Teams
54:28 Quickfire
SaaStr 596: Scaling Revenue in 2022: What's the Same and What's Different? with Confluent President of Field Operations Erica Schultz
Amidst the volatility of today's economic climate and market, GTM leaders need to be especially savvy when it comes to their company growth strategies and earning their customers' love. A renowned enterprise software leader that has led revenue organizations and spearheaded the cloud GTM strategies at companies such as Oracle, New Relic and now Confluent, Erica Schultz is Confluent's President of Field Operations and will share what she has seen evolve in enterprise GTM and tips on how to thrive in the current environment. From PLG and consumption-based pricing, to value-based selling and driving efficient growth, Erica will share veteran insights that will help you develop your own successful GTM strategy.
Full video: https://youtu.be/j293NArWW38
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President at Confluent, Erica Schultz: Cashing in on Your Currency
When Confluent’s President of Field Ops Erica Schultz was 23, she was working at Oracle and cold-emailed the manager of the Argentina office, asking to work for him. This experience would open the door to opportunities in Buenos Aires and Miami, a time in Erica’s life she does not take for granted. As a leader today, she hopes to pass on this sentiment, constantly looking for individuals worth taking a chance on: “As I look around my organization, I think, OK, who’s the undiscovered not-yet-fully-realized talent that we should think about for this role?”
In this episode, Erica and Joubin talk about why Buenos Aires, Argentina is the best city in the world; the lessons she learned from her father and what changed for her after he died of a rare form of cancer at age 54; her stints at Oracle, LivePerson, and New Relic; the importance of earning responsibility as you advance in your career; staying both humble and paranoid; and the importance of what Confluent is doing in the ever-changing digital infrastructure business.
In this episode, we cover:
The incredible influence of Erica’s namesake, her father, who passed away as her career was taking off (09:28)
“The impact we leave is the impact we have on people” (15:21)
How Erica became the captain of the Dartmouth rowing team after being cut from the swim team (18:03)
Developing leaders from within a high-growth organization, and earning responsibility (31:36)
Why Erica left a CRO role at LivePerson to work for the CRO of New Relic (37:03)
Why she had her team at New Relic read “The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown, and loves the story of runner Roger Bannister (41:34)
Being humbled by a changing competitive landscape, and the transformation of the digital infrastructure world (44:17)
Real-time data and why both businesses and consumers increasingly need companies like Confluent (49:19)
What Erica thought when she first met Confluent’s founder CEO Jay Kreps (56:03)
How to transition from operator to executive to board member (59:14)
Links:
Connect with EricaLinkedIn
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
S17:E7 - When and how might you want to use different clouds (Erica Windisch)
In this episode, we talk about the cloud with Erica Windisch, principal engineer at New Relic, and founder of IOpipe. Erica talks about some of the history of the cloud, some of the major cloud providers, and what things as a newbie you might want to consider when deciding to use the cloud.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
New Relic
IOpipe
AWS
Google Cloud
Gatsby Cloud
Microsoft Azure
Netlify
DigitalOcean
API
Amazon EC2
Virtual machine
Serverless
CI/CD
Bitbucket
Git
Apache HTTP Server
What are microservices?
Docker
Amazon S3
What are containers?
SQL
CRUD
VS Code
Visual Studio
GitHub
GPT-3
GitHub Copilot
Erica Windisch
Erica Windisch is principal engineer at New Relic.
Pixie, with Zain Asgar and Ishan Mukherjee
Pixie Labs built an observabiity platform for Kubernetes, which uses eBPF to get telemetry without user intervention. They were recently acquired by New Relic, who open sourced the Pixie software. Co-founders Zain Asgar and Ishan Mukherjee join Craig Box to tell the story and talk about what's next. Guest host Alex Ellis tends his garden.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
web: kubernetespodcast.com
mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
twitter: @kubernetespod
Chatter of the week Episode 116, with Alex Ellis
GrowLab Announcement blog
Alex's talk at the GIFEE Day
Monty Don
OpenFaaS in the RISC-V keynote
New Kubernetes on Edge training course
News of the week eBPF for Windows
GKE Dataplane V2 is GA
Confluent for Kubernetes GA
VMware Tanzu SQL, with MySQL, for Kubernetes, 1.0
VMware Modern Apps Connectivity Solution
Do the State of DevOps survey!
Links from the interview Pixie Labs
What is Pixie overview slides presented to CNCF
Public beta launch and announcement of Series A funding TechCrunch coverage
Pixie Labs acquired by New Relic; New Relic acquires Pixie Labs
A day in the life of a Kiva robot
Recognition for Google Lens clothing recognition
Dog or blueberry muffin?
Episode 125, with Ramiro Berrelleza
How Pixie Works
New Relic goes all-in on OpenTelemetry and Open Source
Pixie on GitHub
Pixienauts community
New Relic upgrades to Platinum member at CNCF
Zain Asgar and Ishan Mukherjee on Twitter
SVP Global Strategic Services at UiPath, Jay Snyder: Driving Customer Engagement Through Value-Based Selling
If a customer doesn’t understand how a product will provide a positive impact to their business, will they buy it? It may seem like a simple question — but for Jay Snyder, identifying and communicating such areas of value to customers is a crucial aspect of keeping a business growing.
On this episode of Go to Market Grit, Jay and Joubin discuss ways to build respect as a new leader, how to effectively communicate a product’s value to a customer, and why simplifying a business is crucial to successfully scaling it.
Links:
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
The Concierge of DevRel with Jonan Scheffler
About Jonan
Jonan Scheffler is the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic. He has a long history of breaking things in public and occasionally putting them back together again. His interest in physical computing often leads him to experiment with robotics and microelectronics, though his professional experience is more closely tied to cloud services and modern application development. In order to break things more effectively he is particularly excited about observability lately, and he’s committed to helping developers around the world live happier lives by showing them how to keep their apps and their dreams alive through the night.
Links:
New Relic: https://newrelic.com/
The Relicans: https://www.therelicans.com/
New Relic Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/new_relic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thejonanshow
The New New Relic with Bill Staples
About Bill Staples
Bill Staples is New Relic’s chief product officer, responsible for driving the company’s market-leading platform strategy and leading New Relic’s product management, engineering and design functions. Staples is an execution-focused product and engineering leader who loves to build and scale cloud-based businesses. Previously Staples was at Adobe, where he led the 1,500+ employee global engineering team behind Adobe’s market-leading Experience Cloud. Prior to Adobe, Staples spent 17 years at Microsoft, including his last role as vice president of Microsoft’s Application platform. At both Microsoft and Adobe, he successfully led transformative product, culture and technical innovation agendas, helping both companies expand multi-billion dollar cloud portfolios with developers and IT as the customer.
Links Referenced
Main company site: https://newrelic.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bstaples
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamstaples/
SaaStr 362: The Future of the Customer with Bernadette Nixon, CEO @ Algolia, Jay Snyder, Chief Customer Officer @ New Relic, and Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight
Customers' expectations are higher than ever with more access to information and options. This dynamic trio of SaaS experts share how to stay customer-centric and set yourself apart in today's rapidly changing environment.
This episode is an excerpt from a session at SaaStr Summit: Enterprise.
Full video: https://youtu.be/DNMId8gYj80
Podcast transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcasts-for-the-week-with-bernadette-nixon-jay-snyder-nick-mehta-loren-padelford-and-jason-lemkin/
SaaStr 313: What The World's Largest SaaS Incumbents Taught Me About Founding & Scaling SaaS Businesses
Today we deep dive into what startups can learn from the large SaaS incumbents of today.
Sara Varni: CMO @ Twilio on her biggest takeaways from her time at Salesforce.
Erica Schultz: President of Field Operations @ Confluent on her biggest takeaways from her time at Oracle.
Whitney Bouck: COO @ Hellosign on her biggest takeaways from her time at Box.
Leyla Seka: Partner @ Operator Collective on her biggest takeaways from her time at Salesforce.
Ryan Bonnici: CMO @ G2 on his biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce.
Ryan Barretto: SVP @ Sprout Social on his biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce
Tien Tzuo: Founder & CEO @ Zuora on his biggest takeaways from his time at Salesforce.
Paul Albright: Board member @ Clarizen on his biggest takeaways from his time at SuccessFactors.
Jaleh Rezaei: Founder & CEO @ Mutiny on her biggest takeaways from her time at Gusto.
Eugenio Pace: Founder & CEO @ Auth0 on his biggest takeaways from his time at Microsoft.
Liat Bycel: VP @ Airtable on her biggest takeaways from her time at Twitter.
Mark Goldberg: Partner @ Index on his biggest takeaways from his time at Dropbox.
Read the full transcript on our blog.
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
SaaStr 302: New Relic CCO Roger Scott on 7 Tips and Tricks to Having Happy Customers at Scale
Customer expectations are at an all-time high, making it more and more difficult for companies to please them. Companies who understand their customers well are the ones who rise to the top over their competitors. New Relic, provider of real-time insights for software-driven businesses has this formula figured out. Hear from Roger Scott, New Relic's EVP and Chief Customer Officer as he shares his 7 tips and tricks for keeping your customers happy— and how to do so at a large scale.
Find the video and full transcript on our blog.
Sponsor message: With up to 20 times higher limits, up to 5 million dollars, and huge rewards like 2x back on recurring SaaS spend and 4x back on Brex Travel. The Brex corporate credit card is designed for startups, all with no personal guarantee. Sign up at brex.com and get card fees waived for life with code SaaStr19
SaaStr 249: New Relic CRO Erica Ruliffson-Schultz on Five Critical Steps to Scaling Enterprise
CRO Erica Ruliffson-Schultz has led New Relic through massive growth, scaling the company's enterprise business 10x since she joined the business pre-IPO. Growing a company's revenues, customer base, team, process, and product doesn't just happen without major work and strategy. Erica will share the five critical steps (and some lessons learned along the way) for scaling in the enterprise.
Missed the session? Here's what Erica talks about:
How to change up your marketing mix
How to transition from SMB to enterprise
Identifying your sweet spot target customers and leveraging your network to access those companies.
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
SaaStr
SaaStr 214: New Relic CRO Erica Schultz on What It Takes To Successfully Scale Into Enterprise & How The Very Best Reps Build Relationships With Their Leads
Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. Prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214m in funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and Blackrock, to name a few. As for Erica, under her CRO role, she leads all go-to-market functions including Marketing, Sales, Operations, Customer Success, Services, and Support. Prior to New Relic, Erica served as Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Customer Success at LivePerson and before that, Erica had a 16-year tenure with Oracle Corporation, where she founded and led numerous teams within the sales organization, including pioneering the company's cloud business, and leading teams for North American and Latin American markets.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
How Erica made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic? What were some of her biggest takeaways from her incredible 16 year journey with Oracle?
Why does Erica believe that enterprise is a "company sport"? Why does each department need to re-platform when making the move to enterprise? How can founders know when is the right time to make the move from SMB to enterprise? Where does Erica often see founders make mistakes with this scaling?
How does the move to enterprise fundamentally impact the sales team? How does the structure of the sales team change with the move? How does the role of marketing change with the move to enterprise? How does this move impact the relationship between sales and marketing? How should compensation plans be altered with the move?
With the scaling of departments and teams, what has Erica seen work really well when it comes to making cross-functional teams communicate really well? What are the inflection points where Erica often see communication or process begin to breakdown? How does Erica ensure the team are still in the trenches with the clients despite the scaling?
From Erica's experience, how do the very best sales reps build relationships with their prospects? Where do many go wrong? How much time does Erica believe reps should be given when it comes to translating relationships to dollars? What is the right way to think about payback period today?
Erica's 60 Second SaaStr:
What does Erica know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
The optimal relationship between CRO and CEO?
The hardest element of being CRO @ New Relic?
Read the full transcript on our blog.
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Episode 16: There are Still Servers, but We Don't Care About Them
Are you interested in going beyond basic monitoring and visibility? Need tools to build and operate serverless applications and extract business intelligence? IOpipe provides extended visibility and metrics around AWS Lambda, including profiling, core dumps, and incoming input events.
Today, we’re talking to Erica Windisch, who is the founder and CTO of IOpipe. She brings her experience in building developer and operational tooling to serverless applications. Erica also has more than 17 years of experience designing and building Cloud infrastructure management solutions. She was an early and longtime contributor to OpenStack and maintainer of the Docker project.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
Nomenclature Battle: Serverless vs. stateless
Building a window of visibility into Lambda: Talking to users and assessing needs/pain points
Observability of the infrastructure: Necessary evil to get to automated healing
Using Lambda at significant levels of scale; some companies grow usage, others go all in right away
Current state of Lambda ecosystem
Is Lambda stable? Indications and no formal SLA
How issues manifest and are exposed
Trends include cold starts, hours-long failures, and multiple function evokes
Infrastructure powering IOpipe: Lambda issues may impact performance of monitoring system, but IOpipe is not necessarily dependent on Lambda
Future of Lambda: Builds applications a specific way, but there are limitations
What would Erica change about Lambda? Run function and define handlers
Lambda functions can be difficult to understand; some developers do not have familiarity and create bottlenecks
Capacity limits around Lambda can be difficult to establish
Links:
Erica Windisch on Twitter
Erica Windisch on Twitch
IOpipe
12-Factor App
Cloud Custodian in Lambda
Velocity London
ServerlessConf London
re:Invent
AWS Glue
.
SaaStr 055: New Relic's Jim Stoneham on Why Your Core Exec Team Should Be Senior Experienced Individuals & When Is The Right Time To Bring On Younger Less Experienced Candidates
Jim Stoneham is VP of Infrastructure Products @ New Relic and Jim joined New Relic when the company acquired Opsmatic, where he was co-founder and CEO. Prior to Opsmatic, Jim was CEO of Payvment, a social commerce platform for SMB sellers that was acquired by Intuit in early 2013. He joined Payvment from Yahoo, where he led Communities (Flickr, Answers, Groups, Delicious) as well as the integrations of Facebook and Twitter into Yahoo products. Prior to that, he spent several years building consumer products at Kodak and Apple. A huge thanks to Cindy Padnos @ Illuminate for making the introduction, without which this interview could not have happened.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
How Jim came to found Opsmatic and why he decided to sell to New Relic over other acquirers?
Why does Jim have a preference toward hiring senior experienced individuals over young talent to the founding team?
At what stage should startups look to bring on fresh, inexperienced candidates who are passionate for the job but in need of mentoring and guidance?
Question From Cindy Padnos: John is a master of employee onboarding, so how does John look to onboard new employees in the most effective and fast manner?
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Jim Stoneham
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