Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Building observable applications with OpenTelemetry (BOA310)

Summary

Danilo and Marcia from AWS Developer Relations discuss building observable applications using OpenTelemetry.
Complexity in software has increased, leading to the adoption of services and microservices.
Observability is crucial for troubleshooting and understanding system behavior.
OpenTelemetry is an open standard for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data.
AWS provides a distribution for OpenTelemetry optimized for AWS infrastructure.
The session includes a demo showing how to instrument an application using OpenTelemetry, both automatically and manually.
The demo covers deploying the instrumented application in various AWS environments like App Runner, ECS, and Lambda.
The importance of business metrics and anomaly detection in observability is highlighted.
Other AWS services for observability, such as CloudWatch RUM and Evidently, are introduced.

OpenTelemetry provides a unified standard to collect telemetry data, which is crucial for modern distributed systems.
AWS's distribution of OpenTelemetry includes adapters for AWS services, making it easier to integrate with the AWS ecosystem.
Instrumenting applications can be done automatically with OpenTelemetry, but manual instrumentation allows for more detailed tracing and custom metrics.
Observability is not just about backend performance; it also includes understanding user experience and feature performance.
AWS offers a variety of tools for observability, each catering to different aspects of application monitoring and user experience.
Developers are responsible for instrumenting their code to ensure observability, which is considered a non-functional requirement akin to security and maintainability.
AWS's commitment to OpenTelemetry and its contributions to the upstream project indicate a strong push towards standardizing observability practices in the cloud.