Cloud & observability: hot topics from AWS re:Invent

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend AWS re:invent, one of the biggest cloud industry events of the year. An event so massive and big that only AWS can pull it off – 50,000 people marching across half a dozen of the finest hotels on the Las Vegas strip. The expo hall alone would have taken more than a couple of days to cover all the vendor booths spread across the expansive Venetian convention center. As I clocked an average of 20K steps every day between various breakout sessions, the expo hall, networking and having some fun, let me share a few of my observations from the event.

Being there among the 50K attendees, I could truly appreciate the cloud ecosystem that has developed over the last decade or more. Every vendor there was solving one or more key challenges related to a specific aspect of the cloud. And these challenges exist regardless of what cloud you may use. The expo hall itself was divided into many sections of vendors under categories like “Analytics,” “Security,” “Data Management,” etc.

We had some really good traffic at the LogicMonitor booth in the expo hall. When I spent some time at the booth talking with the attendees who were interested in our comprehensive observability platform, LM Envision, I heard a few comments that were remarkably similar to what we have heard from other enterprises outside of the event too. The challenges the attendees were talking about were no longer the old “we are struggling to adopt the cloud” or “we are migrating our on-prem data centers to the cloud.” They were talking about more modern use cases and a newer set of challenges that were more relevant to today’s hybrid and multi-cloud realities.

Three observations from an Observability standpoint

1. Multi-cloud is real but wasn’t spoken about – Since this was an AWS event, you could clearly see and hear the “hybrid cloud” messages everywhere, but you couldn’t see the “multi-cloud” messages anywhere. But, the reality is that most enterprises today have at least 3-4 cloud implementations. IT leaders who spoke to me were truly struggling with wanting a cloud-neutral / vendor-agnostic observability platform that can look across multiple clouds and truly assess what is going on across their entire cloud landscape.

2. Tool sprawl is still a major challenge for IT leaders – A senior IT leader at a major medical device manufacturer visited our booth. He shared that he had two of our competitor products already. When I inquired further, he explained that his company does a lot of M&A every year and as a result, their IT organization ends up supporting redundant IT tools and struggles with visibility and costs. He said he has at least six other monitoring tools in addition to the two he named! The solution he was looking for was a single platform that could replace multiple such tools that weren’t quite helping his team anyway.

3. OpenTelemetry and related standards are a huge enabler for Observability – This was a validation I acquired as I was attending multiple breakout sessions as well as from conversations with other peers at the conference. In order for enterprises to be observable, the IT team can enable capturing metrics, logs, and traces from all corners of their IT infrastructure. However, to truly understand issues happening within their applications, the Dev/DevOps teams need to start instrumenting their code to enable advanced troubleshooting and reduce debugging time. OpenTelemetry and related open standards enable you to avoid vendor lock-in by making sure that your instrumentation code will work with any observability tool that supports such open standards effectively. LogicMonitor is proud not only to support these standards but also to remain an active contributor to such open standards.

The entire event was full of such wonderful learnings, validations and epiphanies. I had a wonderful time connecting with old friends as well as making a ton of new friends. 

As we look ahead to 2023, we are excited about the partnership with AWS and all the wonderful things we can do together in this ever-opportunistic space.