This blog post originally appeared on Medium.
One of the highly anticipated events every year is the keynote from Dr. Werner Vogels at the annual AWS Reinvent conference. As CTO of Amazon, Dr. Vogels has considerable influence on product and engineering innovation that directly impacts hundreds of millions of users and developers. Here are three takeaways from Dr. Vogels’ keynote this year.
Dr. Vogels gave numerous examples of the sheer power and acceleration that the cloud gives to product and engineering teams. A few that caught my attention were:
Amongst all these spectacular developments, Dr. Vogels cautioned how the time and effort spent developing any application are typically small compared to the time and effort needed to maintain the application in production (aka operations). A lot of challenges arise from the increasing complexity and strict SLAs as applications go into production: unpredictable data volumes, data skew and load imbalance, unforeseen bottlenecks, contention with other applications, slowness or failures of dependent components, and others.
Lack of observability into the application and the various platforms, services, and tenants whose performance can impact the application is similar to flying a plane through heavy clouds without the aid of flight instruments (no pun intended!). Dr. Vogels announced two observability initiatives from AWS:
My favorite Dr. Vogels quote from the keynote was: “We have covered a lot of ground today. We have talked about the importance of development, how to build dependable applications, and how to effectively run them. If you paid close attention, you will notice that there has been a trend with all these things. More and more, AWS is taking tasks that can be slow, difficult, or time-consuming, and making them easier to use by using advanced technologies to simplify them. These technologies can include automated reasoning or even machine learning.”
Case in point, the large and diverse telemetry data collected from modern applications and systems overwhelms the capabilities of even the most skilled developers and operators today. The rise of frameworks like OpenTelemetry and AWS Fault Injection Simulator add to the volume and diversity of telemetry data collected. As Dr. Vogels points out, innovation in automated methods — powered by the likes of AI/ML, formal verification, etc. — becomes critical to ensure reliable, efficient, and streamlined operations.
I couldn’t agree more since this is exactly why our customers use the Unravel product to simplify their big data operations. Join us to build the future of automation from telemetry data or take our product for a spin on your operational challenges with a free trial.