AWS attendee guide for Cloud Operations track at re:Invent 2021

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. We are super excited to join you at the 10^th annual re:Invent to share the latest from AWS leaders and discover more ways to learn and build. Let’s celebrate this milestone which will be offered in person in Las Vegas (November 29-December 3) and virtually (November 29–December 10). The health and safety of our customers and partners remains our top priority, and you can learn more about it in health measures page. For details about the virtual format, check out the virtual section. If you haven’t already registered, then don’t forget to register and save your spot at your favorite sessions.

The AWS Cloud Operations track at re:Invent offers you sessions that help you enable, provision, and operate your cloud environments for speed with built-in governance control. The sessions vary from intermediate (200) through expert (400) levels, and they help you accelerate the pace of innovation in your business. This post highlights the sessions from the Cloud Operations track that you shouldn’t miss.

Breakout Sessions

AWS re:Invent breakout sessions are lecture-style and one hour long. These sessions are delivered by AWS experts, customers, and partners, and they typically include 10–15 minutes of Q&A at the end. For our virtual attendees, breakout sessions will be made available on-demand in the week after re:Invent.

Level 200 – Intermediate

• COP201 Gain enterprise visibility with AWS Cloud operation dashboards

Learn the tools of the trade in operating your AWS environment at scale. Whether you are in Cloud Operations, Application Administration, Compliance, Security or all of the above, AWS has the tools and technology solutions to enable you to manage your cloud operations reliably and with observability. In this session, you will learn what tools are available to manage and operate your AWS landscape that is compliant by design at all times.

• COP202 Improving cost visibility and allocation

Improve financial transparency and define a cost-allocation strategy tailored to meet the complex needs of your business. Join this session and learn how to organize cost and usage for even the most complex organizations across dimensions specific to your workload. Through AWS products such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, AWS Cost Categories, and AWS Application Cost Profiler, you can establish the necessary cost visibility and accountability within your organization and start running your IT shop like a business.

• COP203 Cost control and governance at scale

Govern cloud usage and avoid cost surprises, all without slowing down innovation within your organization. In this session, learn how to set up guardrails, such as auto-cost-control actions in AWS Budgets or the ML-powered product AWS Cost Anomaly Detection. Discover the latest enhancements in the cost-control space, and learn how you can establish these safeguards to let your builders focus on what they do best—build!

• COP205 Cloud operations at scale with AWS Managed Services

In early 2021, AWS Managed Services (AMS) added AMS Accelerate, a capability that lets AWS operations engineers work alongside customer and partner engineering teams to deliver AWS operations services, such as monitoring, backup, patch, and security operations, via AWS security, management, and governance services. In this session, hear from GE about why they chose to add AMS to their operations suite and the outcomes that they’ve realized, followed by an overview of AMS Accelerate.

• COP206 Observability, the open-source way

In this session, learn about best practices and real-world use cases for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP), Amazon Managed Grafana (AMG), and AWS Distro for Open Telemetry(ADOT) to gain observability. Setting up observability is critical to managing and maintaining your application and infrastructure health. Open-source-based solutions such as AMP, AMG, and ADOT can help you easily set up observability for your workloads on containers, Amazon EC2, and on-premises environments, to name a few.

• COP207 Inside Amazon operations: How Amazon Alexa gains observability

In operations, observability can be hard to achieve due to sheer system complexity. However, AWS observability services, such as Amazon CloudWatch, let you detect, investigate, and remediate problems for both AWS and non-AWS resources to increase your operational health. In this session, learn about the latest observability capabilities and how Amazon Alexa uses CloudWatch to maximize its return on investment, matching daily costs and usage versus budget. Using CloudWatch, Alexa gains visibility, identifying high spend and budget variances, managing overspending risk, highlighting trend forecasts, and using data for forecasting.

• COP219 AWS Cloud Operations Model panel discussion: A 360-degree view

In this session, industry leaders from AWS, as well as an AWS customer and an AWS Partner, share their paths to success with the Cloud Operations Model on AWS. Built on Amazon’s 20+ years of experience in operations management, as well as customer feedback, the Cloud Operations Model describes the roles, processes, and tools that can help you build and operate securely and successfully on the cloud. Join this session to hear how AWS has enabled cloud operations internally, enterprises have used the model to drive operational outcomes, and AWS Managed Services (AMS) and AWS Partners are supporting customers as they move to the cloud.

• COP220 Automate account provisioning and customization with AWS Control Tower

Do you need to create many accounts or create accounts regularly while making sure that they meet user needs and your business and security policies? If so, then join this session to learn how to provision and customize an AWS Control Tower managed account before delivering it to end users.

• COP221 Gain health and performance insights using Amazon CloudWatch

To achieve your operational and business objectives, you can’t afford to have low data visibility. You must be able to answer a wide range of questions (for example, “Is my system up or down?” or “Is it fast or slow, as experienced by my end users?”). Observability solutions can help you collect and analyze data from applications and infrastructure so that you can understand their internal states and be alerted to, troubleshoot, and resolve issues with application availability and performance to improve the end user experience. Join this session to learn the latest on Amazon CloudWatch.

• COP222 Maintain application availability and performance with Amazon CloudWatch

Avoiding unexpected user behavior and maintaining reliable performance is crucial. This session is for application developers who want to learn how to maintain application availability and performance to improve the end user experience. Also, discover the latest on Amazon CloudWatch.

• COP223 Optimize your applications through user insights with Amazon CloudWatch

In this session, learn how you can get insight into your application’s client-side performance and enhance your end user experience. Then, discover how to use Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to proactively monitor endpoints and simulate end user workflows 24/7, while also getting alerted for issues. Finally, learn how Booking.com is evolving their web application monitoring for complete insights using CloudWatch.

• COP224 Operate applications in cloud and hybrid environments using Systems Manager

When moving to the cloud, many enterprises run application workloads in both cloud and hybrid environments. Use the proven AWS approach to deploy a few (or a few thousand) applications to the cloud rapidly, while ensuring continued operation with your on-premises investments. In this session, learn how to use AWS Systems Manager to manage servers and to view and automate operational data on AWS and in your on-premises data centers with a single interface.

Level 300 – Advanced

• COP301 Cloud compliance, assurance, and auditing

In this session, learn how to continuously assess, manage, and maintain compliance for formalized standards, such as those required by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and others. Also, learn about various auditing options, including auditing privileged access across services like Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. Dive deep into how you can achieve governance and compliance using preventive and detective guardrails and other AWS services.

• COP302 Best practices for centralized operations management on AWS

In this session, learn how to build, manage, and operate your mission-critical applications in a secure, automated, reliable, and cost-effective way. This session covers how you can use a single control plane across multiple AWS solutions to manage and govern resources on AWS, on premises, and in hybrid environments. Join this session to learn how to streamline application management, incident management, and compliance management to manage mission-critical applications and services better.

• COP312 Securing and governing your AWS environment at any scale

In this session, learn best practices to manage the security of your AWS accounts and govern your AWS environment. These best practices apply to organizations of any size, whether you are a small startup just getting started, or a large enterprise looking to learn and implement the latest from AWS. Services discussed include AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, AWS Single Sign-On, Amazon Security Hub, AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer, and more!

• COP313 Inside Amazon operations: Operations automated at scale

In this session, learn about Amazon’s CloudRanger solution that uses AWS Systems Manager to automate operations, including the deployment of security agents to more than 1.2 million Amazon EC2 instances. CloudRanger agents collect telemetry on Amazon EC2 instances and take necessary action when issues are detected. Discover how Amazon handles incident management to enable faster resolution of critical application availability and performance issues, as well as new developments with the Systems Manager service.

Level 400 – Expert

• COP401 Customizing and scaling your AWS Control Tower environment

AWS Control Tower provides the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment. Users can further customize their AWS Control Tower landing zones with the Customizations for AWS Control Tower (CfCT) solution. In this session, discover best practices for deploying a scalable CfCT pipeline that lets you test your customizations in a lower environment before promoting them to a production landing zone. Learn about some of the most common CfCT customizations that you should consider for your landing zone, including identity and network management and governance.

Builders’ Sessions

Builders Sessions are small-group sessions led by an AWS expert who guides you as you build the service or product. Each builders’ session begins with a short explanation or demonstration of what you are going to build. Once the demonstration is complete, use your laptop to experiment and build with the AWS expert.

Level 300 – Advanced

• COP320 Application management on AWS

In this builders’ session, learn how you can use the AWS application in AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry to group and manage resources. See an overview of application management in AWS and learn about AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry and AWS Systems Manager Application Manager. Then, get hands-on to create a three-tier web application using AWS Service Catalog, associate metadata to the application, and use Amazon CloudWatch to generate application insights, create a dashboard, and execute an AWS Systems Manager Automation Runbook.

• COP321 Observability for your cloud operations

In this hands-on builders’ session, learn about observability for your cloud operations. Select your own challenge from Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray use cases. Discover how to get started with observability, review common use cases, and explore advanced topics such as CloudWatch metric math. Bring your laptop to this session.

• COP322 Best practices for operational excellence

In this builders’ session, dive deep into how to use AWS cloud operations services to maintain operational excellence in a modern enterprise. Discover the many options available, such as automation, through services like AWS Systems Manager, configuration compliance via AWS Config, maintaining observability and auditability with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail, and more.

Chalk Talks

Chalk Talks are highly interactive sessions with a small audience. Experts lead you through problems and solutions on a digital whiteboard as the discussion unfolds. Each begins with a short lecture (10–15 minutes) delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a 45- or 50-minute Q&A session with the audience.

Level 200 – Intermediate

• COP204-R1 and COP204-R2 Eight Ways to control and manage AWS costs

Take control of your AWS spend and make the best out of AWS billing and cost management services. Join our discussion and explore ways to improve budget setting and detect and address cost spikes proactively. Learn about resources you can use to select and track your purchase commitment and curtail spend based on your spend pattern.

• COP208 AWS Managed Services: Security, compliance, and operations

AWS Managed Services (AMS) helps hundreds of organizations operate their AWS infrastructure more efficiently and securely. Are you wondering how we do it? In this chalk talk, discover the AWS tools, processes, and people that AMS uses to help operate and secure the AWS infrastructure of our customers. Whether you need help from AMS or want to gain a new perspective on cloud operations, this session gives you a high-level overview of how AMS detects, investigates, and resolves issues with organizations’ AWS infrastructures while continuing to scale.

Level 300 – Advanced

• COP303-R1 and COP303-R2 How to prepare your cloud environment for scale and migrations

According to Gartner, 80% of enterprises are planning data center closures by 2025, versus 10% today. Join this chalk talk to learn best practices from cloud foundations and the AWS Well-Architected Framework Management and Governance Lens on the importance of having a well-architected AWS environment for migrations, operational efficiency, and the ability to scale in meeting your business needs.

• COP304 Application management best practices on AWS

In this chalk talk, learn how to simplify application management by standardizing cloud patterns and reducing development time while remaining compliant. Learn how to use AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry and AWS Systems Manager Application Manager to incorporate governance and version control for your applications while maintaining developer speed. Learn how cloud engineering teams across the organization can build and deploy applications consistently using AWS Systems Manager, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Organizations.

• COP305-R1 and COP305-R2 Cloud compliance and auditing best practices on AWS

In this chalk talk, learn the various ways that you can achieve industry and configuration compliance with the help of AWS Cloud operations services. Also, learn the best practices for auditability, including ways that you can maintain appropriate auditing for formalized compliance standards, such as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

• COP306-R1 and COP306-R2 Observability best practices on AWS

In this chalk talk, learn observability best practices that let you efficiently run your applications on AWS. Learn how to monitor your end user experiences with solutions such as Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics, which help you gain visibility into application components and identify bottlenecks using CloudWatch ServiceLens and AWS X-Ray. Also, learn how to manage workloads on containerized and serverless infrastructures using CloudWatch Container Insights and CloudWatch Lambda Insights. Looking for better ways to cut the chaos and dive deep into your observability telemetry? Learn more about CloudWatch Logs Insights, X-Ray Analytics, and metrics analytical capabilities to isolate issues across your application and infrastructure.

• COP314 Best practices for operating in a modern enterprise

In this chalk talk, learn how to use AWS cloud operations services to maintain operational excellence in a modern enterprise. Discover the many options available, such as automation through services like AWS Systems Manager, configuration compliance via AWS Config, maintaining observability and auditability with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail, and more.

• COP315 Observability on a single platform on AWS

In this chalk talk, learn how Amazon CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing a unified view of resources, applications, and services running on AWS and on-premises servers. Explore how CloudWatch is used to detect anomalous behavior, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side-by-side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and provide insights to keep your applications running smoothly. Discover how AWS X-Ray can help you understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot root cause issues and errors.

• COP316-R1 and COP316-R2 Open-source observability

In this chalk talk, dive deep into how Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) automatically scales as your workloads grow or shrink and integrates with AWS security services to enable fast and secure access to data. Discover how Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG) can be used to analyze your metrics, logs, and traces without having to provision servers; configure and update software; and do the heavy lifting involved in securing and scaling Grafana in production.

• COP317 Governance and application management on AWS

In this chalk talk, dive deep into how applications can be used to manage AWS resources in a logical group that operates as a unit. Learn how these logical groups can be used to represent different versions of an application, ownership boundaries for operators, or developer environments, to name a few. Discover how to manage resources like container clusters, Amazon EC2, and AWS CloudFormation; create repositories of your applications and associated resources; and define and manage your application metadata, which can be used to understand the applications and resources across your environments.

• COP318 Best practices for effective application management at AWS

This session introduces best practices for end-to-end management of the resources within applications. We discuss organizing resources with AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry applications, using tags, and tag-based Resource Groups. We also explore attribute-based access control for managing applications. We also show you AWS Systems Manager Application Manager to monitor operational and compliance status, and execute runbooks against your applications. We demonstrate how to synchronize console and API changes to your CloudFormation Stacks. Lastly, we show you how to use synchronized Stacks to redeploy a clone to new environment, migrating from manually created resources.

• COP319 Best practices for multi-account environments

In this chalk talk, discover the key decision points for setting cloud governance to reduce complexity and time to market. Learn how to govern a secure, multi-account cloud environment and best practices for account management, security boundary isolation and structure, and gaining visibility into configuration compliance. Explore the importance of extending AWS Control Tower to new and existing accounts, considerations for AWS Organizations structure, and best practices for guardrail management across the enterprise.

Workshops

Workshops are two-hour interactive learning sessions where you work in small group teams to solve problems using AWS services. Each workshop starts with a short lecture (10–15 minutes) by the main speaker, and the rest of the time is spent working as a group. Come prepared with your laptop and a willingness to learn!

Level 300 – Advanced

• COP307 Observability best practices for modern and traditional applications

Observability can be hard to achieve due to sheer system complexity. Whether in data centers or in the cloud, to achieve operational excellence and meet business objectives, you must understand how your systems are performing. This workshop dives deep into ways that you can use observability to detect and investigate problems while gaining and maintaining observability of your modern and traditional applications. Get hands-on experience with the most common use cases, understand when to use observability, learn about and implement the newest features available, and learn about the growing range of observability solutions, both AWS-native and open source.

• COP308 Cloud operations on AWS

In this hands-on workshop, dive deep into ways that you can operate your cloud and on-premises environments, including infrastructure and applications. Pick your own hands-on challenge to focus on managing and automating infrastructure, application management and governance, and compliance management and assurance.

• COP309 Managing multi-account environments following best practices

Most customers use multiple AWS accounts to consume AWS Cloud services. This workshop teaches you foundational multi-account concepts and patterns that many large AWS customers have used to scale their cloud environments. Learn to create and organize your AWS accounts following AWS recommended practices. Also, learn how to tackle the four core foundational elements of any cloud environment by implementing identity and guardrails, tag governance, networking, and logging capabilities.

• COP310 Cloud compliance and assurance

In this hands-on workshop, learn how to assess and manage compliance and security drift in the cloud. Explore how to map the three lines of defense to automated compliance management, continuous oversight, continuous assessment, and automated evidence gathering and reporting. Also, receive guidance on how to break down silos between business owners, operations, security, compliance, and audit teams using services related to cloud compliance and assurance.

• COP311 Build your own customizable cost reporting dashboards

Get actionable insights to track your AWS cost and usage performance, drive cost-efficient consumption behavior in your organization, and make cost-aware architectural decisions. Join this workshop to learn how you can integrate AWS Cost and Usage Reports with Amazon QuickSight, and build your own dashboards to visualize specific KPIs and savings opportunities that are meaningful to you and your business.

In addition to these sessions, we offer leadership sessions through which you can hear directly from AWS leaders as they share the latest advances in AWS technologies, set the future product direction, and motivate you through compelling success stories. Also, expect to hear about the launch of new and exciting AWS services and features throughout the event.

Still looking for more?

We have an extensive list of curated content on AWS Management and Governance, including case studies, white papers, previous re:Invent presentations, reference architectures, and how-to instructional videos. Check it out here! Subscribe to our AWS Management and Governance YouTube channel to get updates when new videos are added.

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