In this talk, I will illustrate how performance and software engineering can be combined in practice, in two different domains: High Performance Computing and Distributed Systems. First, I will present SkelGIS an HPC-oriented embedded DSL for stencil-based numerical simulations, and MSL a meta-DSL for multi-stencils simulations and its use for energy-aware code variants. Second, I will present Madeus a formal model to efficiently deploy complex distributed software on heterogeneous distributed infrastructures. I will show how Madeus is able to deploy OpenStack much more efficiently than usual production deployment tools. Finally, I will present recent work on the introduction of reconfiguration aspects inside Madeus. I will conclude by talking about the recent third cornerstone of my research: the verification of properties on distributed software deployment and reconfiguration.