AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Operations re:Imagined – Know Before You Go – AWS re:Invent 2024

We are so excited to see you at our annual cloud computing conference, AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas from Dec 2 to Dec 6. At this conference, you’ll have the opportunity to attend thought-provoking keynotes, dive deep into our services, and meet with fellow cloud enthusiasts! No matter your level of expertise, we’ll have sessions and events tailored for each one of our attendees.

Given all the services you’ll be learning about, you’ll want to begin giving some thought about which sessions you want to attend for your operations. Managing nodes and applications can be complex when operating on AWS and in hybrid and multicloud environments especially as new technologies are evolving. Centralized Operations enables you to identify operational insights for your nodes and applications. Services such as AWS Systems Manager, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Resource Explorer have been built and designed to apply best practices benefiting both AWS and its customers. From managing and tagging resources at scale to building upon operational data to provide actionable insights. Discover the latest capabilities that bolster operational best practices at AWS.

AWS re:Invent offers learning sessions in a variety of formats and levels so that you can expand your knowledge and grow your skills at a pace that is right for you. Levels are indicated by the session ID. Learn more about re:Invent session types.

This blog highlights a few AWS re:Invent 2024 centralized operations sessions that can help you get more out of AWS Cloud Operations, regardless of where you are in your cloud journey with AWS.

Author’s Pick

As you begin building out your multi-account environment, it can prove to be challenging to try to implement tagging policies and keeping track of all the different resources deployed across your accounts. While tagging and resource management are important pieces of a cloud foundation journey, it can take time to think through a strategy for both tagging and resource management that will work for your organization. That’s why we want to highlight the chalk talk below where AWS experts will discuss different strategies that they’ve seen work for different customers. This insight will hopefully help jumpstart your tagging and resource management strategy or provide you with insight on how to continuously improve what you already have!

COP351 | Effective multi-account tagging and resource discovery strategies – Chalk Talk 

Developing and implementing an effective tagging and resource management strategy is time consuming and complex, especially when you’re managing thousands of resources across multiple applications and AWS accounts. In this chalk talk, you learn how to discover untagged resources, organize resources into applications, and then manage those applications across your AWS Organizations. You then get an opportunity to ask AWS experts questions about how to manage resources and applications at scale.

More Operations Management Sessions to Attend:

COP321 | Centralize Multicloud Management using AWS – Breakout Session 

Operating in a multi-cloud environment may introduce operational complexity. In this session, learn to streamline operations with AWS Systems Manager, which allows for easier instance management across all environments. Gain insights into performance with Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Grafana, which delivers a unified dashboard of metrics and logs from any data source. With these services, you can simplify day-to-day tasks, maintain control, and optimize resources – whether your workloads span AWS, on-premises, or multiple clouds. Take the complexity out of multicloud and focus on what really matters – running your business.

COP325 | Operating your fleet of resources at scale is easier than you think! – Breakout Session 

In the past, operating a fleet of AWS, multicloud, and on-premises resources across an organization and at scale, often required many tools and manual processes. Increase efficiency and reduce costs with automation on AWS. In this session, you will learn how AWS Systems Manager, Amazon CloudWatch, and others can be used across your compute fleets to easily automate and manage your resources. Thousands of customers use these services to operate millions of resources across their AWS, multicloud, on-premises, and even IoT fleets for patching, deploying apps, resolving incidents, and much more. Now we’ve made it even easier!

COP328 | Streamlining application management on AWS – Breakout Session 

Developers and operations teams need a centralized way to organize, visualize, and operate resources to ensure optimal efficiency and minimize operational overhead. This breakout session will explore best practices for managing and monitoring applications on AWS using AWS myApplications. We will also discuss how to organize your resources into logical application units, enabling you to view operational data on your applications from a single pane of glass. Attendees will learn how to consolidate visibility of their application portfolio, quickly identify[1]  key metrics about cost health, security posture, and performance, and accelerate the deployment and scaling of applications using a standardized, organized approach.

COP337 | All things patching: Manage and monitor at scale – Chalk Talk 

In this session, learn how to implement a centralized approach to patching across your AWS Organization, ensuring that EC2, on-premises, and multicloud instances are up-to-date with the latest operating system security patches. You will learn how to deploy a patching policy that enables a central account to determine which instances, accounts, and applications are not compliant to the central policy. Furthermore, you will learn how to quickly determine which instances across your entire organization are missing specific patches, enabling you to reduce your mean time to remediation for fixing security vulnerabilities, increasing the security posture of your organization.

COP339 | Adopt AWS’s Ops management culture on your team – Chalk Talk 

AWS knows that service reliability is something that you rely on. In this session, learn how Amazon has used cultural and technical mechanisms to help teams more effectively operate in a decentralized organization, especially for critical processes like incident management. We’ll dive into the mechanisms and tools that our on-calls use to triage, prioritize, respond to and mitigate events, while exploring how our culture influences all of these. We’ll breakdown and share the practical methodologies and tools that we use to ensure a low day-to-day ops load and a lower Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) for incidents.

COP346 | Centralize audit data for hybrid and multicloud environments – Chalk Talk

As customers accelerate their migrations to the cloud and transform their businesses, some find themselves in situations where they have to manage IT operations in hybrid environments. Does this sound like you? This chalk talk walks you through how to enable AWS CloudTrail Lake, import historical CloudTrail logs, and aggregate your audit logs from partner integrations, custom solutions, and many AWS resources. It also discusses how to query this data for investigative analysis and security purposes.

Conclusion

In this blog, we covered some Cloud Operations sessions specifically related to Operations that cover interesting and important topics within the topic area! We look forward to seeing you at these sessions. Visit the Cloud Operations Kiosk if you have more questions or want a deeper dive in the AWS Village at the Expo in the Venetian. To learn more about our kiosks and sessions, be sure to check out our re:Invent event session site here.

About the authors:

Tiffany Chen

Tiffany Chen is a Solutions Architect on the CSC team at AWS, focused on the healthcare and life sciences industry. She has supported AWS customers with their deployment workloads and currently works with Enterprise customers to build well-architected and cost-optimized solutions. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, gardening, baking, and watching basketball.

Winnie Chen

Winnie Chen is a Solutions Architect at AWS supporting enterprise greenfield customers, focusing on the financial services industry. She has helped customers migrate and build their infrastructure on AWS. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and spending time outdoors through activities like hiking, biking and rock climbing.