re:Invent 2024 and observability

As a product manager, that's my main focus. Great insights around pain points and expectations on what we should be delivering in 2025. Overall, a lot of interest in best practices on how to standardize on OpenTelemetry, folks looking into data lakes, understand and control costs, and yeah AI was also a topic, you'd guess.

A trend that started, I believe, at least 3 years ago is that observability vendors have a considerable footprint in the expo hall. It's exciting to see for me how others position and explain their offerings. No big surprises, but, again, a lot of OpenTelemetry across the board.

I had my booth duty at the AWS Observability stand on Thursday afternoon, folks already a little tired, however, tons of excellent questions and feedback. I want to thank everyone who dropped by, really appreciate all the interactions.

This year I was lucky: our 400 level chalk talk session was already on Monday, so I was able to focus on other things for the rest of the week. BTW, you can now download ALL session slide decks and watch many of the sessions via the AWS Events Content hub, for free and without login.

I'd encourage you to read Top Announcements for AWS Cloud Operations at re:Invent 2024 to learn about what we launched recently. One thing I want to highlight particularly is a pre:Invent launch that I was involved in: check out the observability solutions (these are the open-source ones), covering telemetry collection, dashboarding, and alerting, discoverable via a catalog and supported by AWS.

Meeting my colleagues is certainly one of the perks I appreciate. It was a great show and I learned a lot from our customers. Only bittersweet thing: I usually don't go to re:Play and this time around I really regret it. Weezer played :(