Building the future of cloud operations at any scale
Cloud Operations
The VP of Search, Observability & Cloud Operations, Nandini Ramani, gave a presentation at re:Invent 2024 that included important information about how AWS is influencing cloud operations going forward. To assist you improve the agility, efficiency, and security of your cloud operations, here is a roundup of the most important announcements.
1. Transform how you govern
Use the Appropriate Instruments and Governance Structures First
Selecting technologies that offer uniform visibility throughout your cloud environment is important.
You should be able to safeguard and manage your cloud operations with the help of governance frameworks.
Maintain Visibility and Stop Noncompliant Behavior
You should be able to identify undesirable activity and avoid compliance problems with the aid of tools.
Being visible is essential for seeing issues before they become more serious.
Controls are Simple to Use and Scalable
Even in huge contexts, controls should be simple to implement.
Implement these rules widely to avoid any security threats or unauthorized changes.
Avoid Drift and Boost Compliance and Security
Make sure that uniform policies are enforced to all of your cloud resources to avoid configuration fluctuations.
Boost security and compliance posture with proactive management and automation.
AWS Systems manager
Increase Operational Effectiveness
Makes it easier to manage nodes in multicloud, hybrid, and EC2 settings.
Simplifies node management to increase overall effectiveness.
Management and Remediation in One Place
Enables scaled management of all nodes with a single view.
Unmanaged nodes are simple to locate, diagnose, and repair.
Connectivity to Amazon Q Developer
From anywhere in the AWS dashboard, take control of and see your nodes.
To manage your nodes and obtain insights fast, use Amazon Q Developer.
Declarative Policies
Keep Yourself Consistent Throughout Changes
Even when new features, accounts, or APIs are added, policies remain in effect.
Guarantees that policies are consistently applied without modifications.
Managed Controls and Supported Services
Supports VPC, EBS, and EC2 configurations at the moment.
The AWS Control Tower offers managed controls.
Make Policy Implementation Easier
Standard configurations for AWS services are enforced with the aid of declarative policies.
By stopping non-compliant behavior, they guarantee compliance.
Examples of Usage
Set up EC2 to only permit instance launches with particular AMIs.
Block all organization-wide public access in VPCs.
Resource Control Policies (RCPs)
Use AWS Control Tower for deployment
- For simpler maintenance, you can use AWS Control Tower to implement RCP-based controlled controls.
Implement Access Limitations
Example: Even with individual bucket policies, enforce the rule that no one outside your company can access Amazon S3 buckets.
Gives authority over who has access to particular resources.
Additional to SCPs (Service Control Policies)
SCPs control the IAM roles and users maximum permissions.
RCPs manage your organization’s maximum permissions on AWS resources.
Preventive Measures to Protect Data
RCPs assist in establishing a data boundary throughout your AWS environment.
They limit large-scale external access to AWS resources.
2. Transform how you observe
Essential to the Effectiveness of Business
To function effectively at any size, observability is necessary.
It offers the visibility required to take prompt action and make wise choices.
New AWS Capabilities
- In order to improve visibility into databases, containers, networks, infrastructure, and applications, AWS added additional functionality.
Quick Issue Resolution
Helps identify root causes of problems faster, improving response times.
Increases overall operational efficiency.
Reports for AWS Fault Injection Service experiments
Conduct experiments with fault injection
To test disaster recovery and failover plans, create realistic failure scenarios.
Helps practice handling failures and improve system resilience.
Automatic Experiment Reports
AWS FIS now generates reports for experiments, saving time and effort in resilience testing.
Reports from your Amazon CloudWatch Dashboard combine activities and record app reactions.
Monitor network flows in Amazon Cloudwatch
Monitor Network Performance
To keep tabs on your AWS workloads network performance almost instantly, use flow monitors.
Tracks the performance of AWS services (S3, RDS, DynamoDB) and compute instances (EC2, EKS).
Detect and Troubleshoot Issues
Identify and assign network issues that are impacting your workloads as soon as possible.
Helps identify problems by providing TCP-based measurements for packet loss, latency, and general network health.
Amazon Cloudwatch Database Insights
Support for Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL are now supported.
Gives these database engines improved observability.
Solving Integrated Database Issues
Designed to speed up database troubleshooting for developers, DBAs, and DevOps engineers.
Provides a consolidated view of operating system, database, and application logs and metrics.
Enhanced observability for ECS in Amazon Cloudwatch Container Insights
Enhanced Observability for ECS
Offers detailed metrics at the cluster and container levels for Amazon ECS operating on EC2 and Fargate.
Speeds up problem isolation and troubleshooting.
Visual Drill-Down for Issue Detection
To find problems like memory leaks, simply dig up and down through the levels of the container.
Minimizes mean time to resolution by prompt problem identification.
3. Transform how you analyze
Simplified Data Analysis
It can take a lot of time to analyze performance issues from raw data.
To effectively evaluate data without moving it between systems, you require scalable storage and query engines.
New Features in CloudWatch and OpenSearch
AWS enhances Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon OpenSearch’s search and analytics features.
Better observability and analysis are made possible by zero-ETL integrations, which enable smooth data processing.
Application transaction spans in Amazon Cloudwatch
Complete Visibility into Application Transactions
Explains application transaction spans in detail, which monitor user-application component interactions.
Helps in the understanding of application performance and end-user impact by developers and on-call engineers.
Improvements to the Interactive Visual Editor and Logs Insights
To respond to inquiries about performance, use a visual editor.
Analysis possibilities are improved by improvements to Logs Insights queries.
Advanced Features in CloudWatch Logs
- Comprises metric extraction for transaction spans, data masking, and forwarding through subscription filters.
Zero-ETL for Amazon Cloudwatch logs and Amazon OpenSearch service
Zero-ETL Integration
With zero-ETL connectivity, CloudWatch and OpenSearch now provide consumers the best of both services.
OpenSearch SQL and the Piped Processing Language (PPL) are available to CloudWatch clients.
Selected Dashboards to Help with Quicker Troubleshooting
- Innovative dashboards for offered logs, such as AWS WAF, CloudTrail, and Amazon VPC, allow debugging more quickly.
Seamless Data Analysis
- CloudWatch Logs can now be easily analyzed by OpenSearch users without requiring duplicate data.
Conclusion
Improved Control and Governance
Declarative Policies and enhanced node management in Systems Manager are two examples of new features that increase security and governance.
Policies for resource control help in controlling access to various AWS resources.
Improved Observability
Improved ECS observability, database insights for Amazon Aurora, and new CloudWatch features for network traffic monitoring.
Application transaction spans assist analysis and debugging.
Integrated Analytics and Data Management
Operational and security data analysis is revolutionized by Zero-ETL integrations and OpenSearch improvements.
ETL pipeline management, context construction, and data copying are all eliminated by streamlined services.
Unified and Simplified Experience
- You can concentrate on innovation and providing your clients with better applications thanks to AWS more integrated and connected experience.