AWS re:Invent 2023 – Cloud Operations for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond

Introduction to AWS re:Invent

AWS re:Invent serves as an educational conference organized by AWS in Las Vegas for the worldwide cloud computing community. This in-person gathering includes keynote revelations, chances for training and certification, over 2,000 technical sessions, the Expo, after-hours events, and many other valuable experiences.

Overview of the Session

The speaker of this session was Nandini Ramani, a leader at AWS who heads the monitoring and observability of cloud services. With over 20 years of experience, she is known for breaking tech barriers and shaping products and strategies for startups and global giants like Oracle. Holder of 17 patents, she is celebrated as a powerful female engineer, honored in PharmaVoice 100, and listed in the Hall of Femme.

In this session, we discovered how AWS revolutionized its cloud operations, offering solutions at scale for governance, compliance, observability, and operations. The session also included how AWS Cloud Operations is shaping the future with automated governance and intelligent, application-centric operations, driving growth and innovation. The session also had customers speak about their experiences in implementing AWS services to create a cloud operating model for operational excellence, breaking down silos, and optimizing costs. We gained insights into the latest AWS capabilities, enhancing governance, compliance, resiliency, and performance across various environments.

New Launches

Management and Governance

1. AWS Control Tower releases 65 new controls supporting digital sovereignty

AWS Control Tower streamlines secure, multi-account AWS environments by establishing a landing zone with best-practice blueprints. It enables governance through customizable controls, adhering to AWS best practices, and implementing security, compliance, and operations rules.

2. Amazon CloudWatch multi-data source querying:

Amazon CloudWatch now offers unified querying across multiple sources, providing a consolidated view of hybrid and multi-cloud metrics. This feature enhances real-time application health visibility, accelerates critical event resolution, and allows overlaying data from different sources on the same graphs and dashboards at no additional cost. It enables the creation of alarms and detection of complex issues across AWS, on-premise, and multi-cloud data sources.

3. AWS Systems Manager low-code visual designer for runbooks:

AWS Systems Manager Automation now supports a low-code visual design experience for authoring and editing runbooks. Developers can drag and drop Automation actions and AWS APIs onto a canvas, connecting them as steps to visualize runbook logic easily. The visual design experience pre-populates parameters and validates real-time actions, ensuring efficient and confident runbook creation.

4. Amazon CloudWatch Logs Infrequent Access

Amazon CloudWatch Logs now offers a cost-effective Infrequent Access log class for rarely accessed logs, enabling customers to consolidate logs efficiently. This new class, designed to lower costs, aids in building a comprehensive observability solution by centralizing logs for ingestion, querying, and storage. It provides a 50% lower per GB ingestion price than the Standard log class.

5. AWS Config periodic recording to scale change tracking

AWS Config introduces periodic recording to track resource configuration changes at scale efficiently. This extension complements AWS Config’s continuous recording, capturing the latest configuration changes once every 24 hours to streamline delivery. Both continuous and periodic recording options are priced based on the number of configuration items.

6. Amazon CloudWatch natural language query generation

Amazon CloudWatch has introduced natural language query generation for Logs and Metrics Insights. This feature lets you describe the insights you seek, automatically generating Logs or Metrics Insights queries. It offers three key capabilities: generating new queries from descriptions or questions, providing query explanations to help you learn the language, and refining existing queries through guided iterations.

7. Amazon CloudWatch Logs Anomaly Detection

Amazon CloudWatch alarms monitor metrics and notify you when they deviate from configured thresholds. Anomaly detection enhances this by automating the setup and allowing adjustments to operational thresholds. Amazon CloudWatch anomaly detection calculates baselines using statistical and machine learning algorithms, minimizing anomalies with minimal user intervention.

8. AWS Config natural language query generation

AWS Config introduces a natural language querying feature powered by generative AI, simplifying the investigation of AWS resource configurations and compliance metadata. This empowers non-coders to query resource configurations independently, reducing the need for specialized teams and expediting data exploration for experts.

JP Morgan's Observability Evolution with AWS for Seamless Growth and Innovation

Sandhya Sridharan, JP Morgan – Sandhya spoke about how JP Morgan has faced an increasingly complex observability estate by implementing AWS. They have experienced exponential growth in their technology usage, which has scaled up their business operations and achieved a seamless customer experience, infrastructure modernization, complex applications, and high regulation in the industry.

Disney's AWS-Powered Observability for Accelerated Speed, Agility, and Optimization for Business Excellence

Alexi Varanko, VP, The Walt Disney Company – Alexi shared with the crowd that with AWS features and observability, Disney has achieved greater speed and agility, helping teams quickly understand the business value. Data and observability are at scale, making it easy for teams to access data and gain visibility. Additionally, Alexi added that they have great optimization capacity that helps reduce unused resources.

Conclusion

The session Cloud Operations for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond provided a comprehensive insight into AWS’s innovative approach to cloud operations, presenting solutions for governance, compliance, observability, and scale operations. Learning about automated governance and application-centric operations gave us a glimpse into where AWS Cloud Operations is heading.

Attendees gained valuable insights into the latest AWS capabilities, enhancing governance, compliance, resiliency, and performance across varied environments, cementing the session as a valuable source of knowledge for navigating the dynamic landscape of cloud technology. Noteworthy releases featured in the session could lead to progress in different areas, aiming to raise standards worldwide.

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