The Ultimate Guide to Reliability Talks at re:Invent 2020

This year AWS re:Invent has gone online. While the overall schedule has a ton of great content, these 4 talks really stood out to us as interesting for reliability engineering-focused folks. 

Reliability, consistency, and confidence through immutability
DEC 1, 2020 | 2:15 PM – 2:45 PM PST
Immutable infrastructure is a model in which no updates, security patches, or configuration changes happen in place on production systems. If any change is needed, a new version of the architecture is built and deployed. Since changes aren’t allowed in immutable infrastructure, you can be sure about the state of the deployed system. Immutable infrastructures are more consistent, reliable, and predictable, and they simplify many aspects of software development and operations by preventing common issues related to mutability. This session dives deep into this topic, and you learn why immutable infrastructure is an important concept in cloud architecture.

Comment: Immutable infrastructure tries to minimize the risk to production management is random changes in production that aren’t audited. This technique, in conjunction with reasonable SLOs, can ease the pain of managing your production environment and keeping it up to date.

Ignite migration and modernization with DevSecOps
DEC 2, 2020 | 8:15 AM – 8:45 AM PST
Companies employ DevOps practices to expedite production of new application features and accelerate migration to AWS through better collaboration and automated testing. The challenge for many organizations is getting application features delivered at a fast pace while embedding needed security at the speed of DevOps. In this session, learn how AWS users, together with third-party solutions from AWS Marketplace, easily turn the idea of DevSecOps into well-orchestrated operating models. Hear how Silicon Valley Bank used third-party software to improve performance, availability, and security while migrating and modernizing their applications.

Open-source observability at AWS
DEC 3, 2020 | 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM PST
Hear from a CNCF SIG observability (o11y) member on the state of open-source o11y on AWS. From the Fluent Bit-based FireLens to Prometheus metrics in Amazon CloudWatch to OpenTelemetry, there is a lot to discuss and show in the context of microservices, containers, and serverless computing.

Comment: There is so much great stuff happening in Open Source, it’s hard to keep up with all of it. This talk should give a great update on observability directly from the source

Incident management in a distributed organization
DEC 8, 2020 | 9:45 AM – 10:15 AM PST
AWS knows that service reliability is something that you rely on. In this session, learn how Amazon has used cultural mechanisms to help teams more effectively operate in a decentralized organization, especially for critical processes like incident management. This session also shares how AWS uses different principles to help teams continuously improve their operations, from readiness reviews to post-incident learning.

Comment: Reliability takes more than just the latest tech, your team needs to work together and properly understand and prioritize the work. We’re looking forward to learning more about AWS culture for distributed incident management.

Speed up innovation with cloud management and governance
DEC 16, 2020 | 3:00 AM – 4:00 AM PST
When enterprises modernize their application development strategies in order to serve millions of users globally and improve developer efficiency, operations management becomes even more crucial for businesses to run smoothly. IT operations or DevOps teams often need to provision and take operational actions on hundreds of thousands of applications and resources daily while maintaining safety and compliance. How can IT make operations management and governance easy and efficient, while also enjoying the freedom and speed of innovation that the cloud brings? In this session, hear from AWS senior leader Bill Vass on the future of monitoring, management, and governance, both on AWS and on-premises.

Comment: Creating clear and simple governance is critical to running large scale IT environments that meet reliability and business goals. 

Comment: We love to hear from end customers who are improving their production reliability and security. All DevOps environments require a collection of tools to work together, so understanding how Silicon Valley Bank constructed their environment will be very interesting.

AWS re:Invent is free, so register today to take advantage of a great opportunity to dig a little deeper into our favorite topic: reliability!