AWS attendee guide for DevOps and Developer Productivity track at re:Invent2021

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services for the global cloud computing community. We are super excited to join you at the 10^th annual re:Invent to share the latest from AWS leaders and discover more ways to learn and build. Let’s celebrate this milestone, which will be offered in person in Las Vegas (November 29-December 3) and in virtual (November 29–December 10) formats. The health and safety of our customers, and partners remains our top priority and you can learn more about it in health measures page. For details about the virtual format, check out the virtual section. If you haven’t already registered, don’t forget to register and save your spot at your favorite sessions.

The AWS DevOps and Developer Productivity track at re:Invent offers you with sessions that are combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. The sessions vary from intermediate (200) through expert (400) levels, and help you accelerate the pace of innovation in your business. This blog post highlights the sessions from the Cloud Operations track that you shouldn’t miss.

Breakout Sessions

 AWS re:Invent breakout sessions are lecture-style and one hour long. These sessions are delivered by AWS experts, customers, and partners, and they typically include 10–15 minutes of Q&A at the end. For our virtual attendees, breakout sessions will be made available on demand in the week after re:Invent. 

Level 200 – Intermediate

• DOP208-R1 and DOP208-R2 DevOps revolution

While DevOps has not changed much, the industry has fundamentally transformed over the last decade. Monolithic architectures have evolved into microservices. Containers and serverless have become the default. Applications are distributed on cloud infrastructure across the globe. The technical environment and tooling ecosystem has changed radically from the original conditions in which DevOps was created. So, what’s next? In this session, learn about the next phase of DevOps: a distributed model that emphasizes swift development, observable systems, accountable engineers, and resilient applications.

Level 300 – Advanced

• DOP301 How to reuse patterns when developing infrastructure as code

This session explores the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) constructs and AWS CloudFormation modules and how they can be used to make building applications easier on AWS. Learn how you can extend CloudFormation to include support for third-party resources and how those resource types can be used by AWS Config.

• DOP309 Amazon builders’ library: Operational excellence at Amazon

Operational excellence at Amazon is achieved through a DevOps model, where software development teams operate the systems they build. In this session, Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek describes Amazon’s operational practices that he has observed during his 15 years of building and operating services at Amazon. Hear David describe the habits that teams have adopted, such as how teams handle retrospectives, share knowledge, and regularly review operational metrics as a team. David discusses how these behaviors have led teams to innovate to build better tools and make architectural shifts.

• DOP310 Enabling decentralized development teams with a shared services platform

Speed in software development requires being able to equip development teams with tools and guardrails for DevOps, security, and infrastructure configuration. Too often, central teams find they need to piece together their own custom solutions or compromise the speed of their development organization in order to maintain standards. In this session, dive deep into the crawl, walk, and run options and best practices for building a shared services platform on AWS using tools and services such as AWS Copilot, AWS Proton, and pre-built solutions using AWS CloudFormation.

• DOP311 Incorporating continuous resilience in your development ecosystem

Today, resilience encompasses a broad range of considerations from infrastructure, application patterns, and data management to application building and monitoring. Additionally, after incorporating resilience, it is essential to maintain it in a continuous manner. In this session, explore various considerations for implementing processes designed to provide continuous improvement through a DevOps methodology. Review various services that can incorporate resilience in the development process in a nearly continuous manner.

• DOP312 Observing your applications from development through production

Implementing observability differs at various stages of the software development lifecycle. In development, detailed logging and tracing are necessary to understand application behavior. In testing, logging and tracing are needed but in varying levels of detail and must be augmented by new metrics. In integration and production, it’s necessary to correlate and contextualize large volumes of data with dashboards that encompass metrics, alarms, and notifications connected to internal and external events. In this session, explore the mechanisms, mental models, and tools (including Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS X-Ray and Amazon DevOps Guru) that top-performing teams use to observe applications throughout various stages of the software development lifecycle.

• DOP313 Best practices for securing your software delivery lifecycle

In this session, learn about ways you can secure your AWS CI/CD pipeline. Review topics like security of the pipeline versus security in the pipeline, and learn about practices to incorporate security checkpoints across various pipeline stages, security event management, and aggregation of vulnerability findings into a unified display. This session also introduces foundational methodologies that combine best practices, processes, and tools to increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services securely.

• DOP314 Write, deploy, and provision cloud resources with AWS Developer Tools

In this session, learn how you can use various AWS Developer Tools to improve your ergonomics across the entire development lifecycle. This session dives deep into IDE extensions, SDKs, and toolkits that provide first-class integrations with AWS services. It also explores how to manage and fine-tune your resources with the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI); how to define your infrastructure in common programming languages with AWS CDK; and how to automate testing, building, debugging, and deployment.

• DOP315 What’s new with AWS CloudFormation and AWS CDK

Join this session to learn about new features to up-level your infrastructure as code (IaC) experiences on AWS. It covers working with AWS CloudFormation modules and AWS CDK constructs to make working with AWS easier; CloudFormation registry to streamline creating, publishing, discovering, and using AWS and third-party plugins; CloudFormation StackSets and CDK Pipelines to automate the deployment of resources and applications across multiple AWS Regions and accounts; CloudFormation Guard 2.0 to attain security and best practice compliance before deployments reach production; and more. Explore how AWS is improving our IaC coverage of AWS services and features in a scalable, decentralized way and how you can contribute.

• DOP325 Building with the new AWS SDKs for Rust, Kotlin, and Swift

Writing code in the AWS SDKs for Rust, Kotlin, and Swift has never been as easy as it is now. This session explores how AWS built these SDKs in parallel, the commonalities they share, and how to build an application with each one. Then, it details best practices for using the SDKs and how to use the features to test your code efficiently. Lastly, this session takes a close look at how the SDKs work and reviews the road map for the future.

• DOP328-S Slack is the digital HQ for AWS developers and DevOps teams (sponsored by Slack)

With increased pressure on software teams to release high-quality products faster, it’s more important than ever to work effectively in an interdependent and cross-functional manner. Yet, communication and collaboration have not changed to reflect the way Agile and DevOps teams actually get work done. Join this session to find out why Slack is the digital HQ for engineering and operations teams. This presentation is brought to you by Slack, an AWS Partner. Speakers: Logan Franey (Slack) and Clint Burns (Slack).

Level 400 – Expert

• DOP402-R1 and DOP402-R2 Automating cross-account CI/CD pipelines

When building a deployment strategy for your applications, using a multi-account approach is a recommended best practice. This limits the area of impact for changes made and results in better modularity, security, and governance. In this session, dive deep into an example multi-account deployment using infrastructure as code (IaC) services such as the AWS CDK, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CloudFormation. Also explore a real-world customer use case that is deploying at scale across hundreds of AWS accounts.

Builders’ Sessions

Builders Sessions are small-group sessions led by an AWS expert who guides you as you build the service or product. Each builders’ session begins with a short explanation or demonstration of what you are going to build. Once the demonstration is complete, use your laptop to experiment and build with the AWS expert.

Level 300 – Advanced

• DOP303 Assessing your application resiliency using chaos engineering

This builders’ session guides you through the principles of chaos engineering and building observability to assess the resiliency of your application and infrastructure. Walk through a hands-on exercise using AWS Fault Injection Simulator to inject faults and observe the impacts using various managed services such as an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard. Learn to use Amazon DevOps Guru, which uses machine learning for observability, to improve the minimum time to recovery (MTTR) by decreasing downtime.

• DOP304 Creating and publishing AWS CloudFormation public resources

This builders’ session guides you through the process for creating AWS CloudFormation extensions for a CloudFormation public or private registry. Also, learn how to consume resource types from the registries created by other teams or organizations.

• DOP305-R1 and DOP305-R2 Continuous deployment with AWS CDK Pipelines

CDK Pipelines is a new AWS CDK construct that simplifies defining and building CI/CD pipelines for safely deploying software changes. This builders’ session shows you how to effectively use CDK Pipelines to manage software releases.

Chalk Talks

Chalk Talks are highly interactive sessions with a small audience. Experts lead you through problems and solutions on a digital whiteboard as the discussion unfolds. Each begins with a short lecture (10–15 minutes) delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a 45- or 50-minute Q&A session with the audience.

Level 200 – Intermediate

• DOP201 Provisioning, automating, and orchestrating IaC on AWS

This chalk talk answers your questions about infrastructure as code (IaC), including relevant AWS services and partner products. It covers topics like IaC patterns, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and AWS CloudFormation, augmentation of your CI/CD workflows with services like AWS Systems Manager, and how to select the right tools for the job. Join this talk and bring your questions.

• DOP202 Increasing availability with AWS observability solutions

In this chalk talk, learn how you can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain insights about the trends and patterns of your infrastructure performance in real time. Learn how to slice and dice your CloudWatch Container Insights metrics to help you gain actionable insights. Also, learn how to monitor blue/green deployments to stay away from downtimes. Lastly, discuss how to use metric querying to analyze and compare how your business is doing across different areas.

• DOP203-R1 and DOP203-R2 Getting started developing backend applications in the cloud

This chalk talk dives deep into the most common strategies for organizing the development of complex cloud applications using various AWS services and solutions. Learn about how to get started with your local development environment, about how to select the right infrastructure, and about achieving the fastest time to market. Join this talk and bring your questions.

• DOP204 Testing on AWS

Testing software is a crucial part of the software delivery lifecycle, with testing methodologies prescribed for every stage of the process from local unit testing on a developer laptop to load testing production environments. This chalk talk briefly covers several test methodologies, then transitions to a Q&A session where you can ask AWS experts your testing-related questions.

• DOP209-R1 and DOP209-R2 Amazon’s DevOps culture

In this chalk talk, learn about how Amazon enables its developers to rapidly release and iterate software while maintaining industry-leading standards on security, reliability, and performance. Consider the tradition of two-pizza teams and how to maintain a culture of DevOps in a large enterprise. Also, hear how you can help AWS customers build such a culture for themselves.

• DOP210 Using on-premises Git with AWS Developer Tools for security and compliance

In this chalk talk, learn about using AWS Development Tools in conjunction with third-party Git solutions, such as GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket Server, and more.

• DOP211-R1 and DOP211-R2 Building scalable machine-learning pipelines

In this chalk talk, explore how to build, automate, manage, and scale machine learning (ML) workflows using the AWS-native DevOps tools and services. Learn how to provision the underlying resources needed to enable CI/CD capabilities for your ML development lifecycle. Also, learn how to use the built-in templates or create your own custom templates using AWS CloudFormation.

Level 300 – Advanced

• DOP302 Continuous compliance for your development workflow

This chalk talk dives deep into the importance of and mechanisms for meeting security and compliance requirements for your organization. Learn ways that you can enforce pre- and post-deployment standards, shift-left testing, and use of services like Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer, AWS CloudFormation Guard, and AWS Config for security static analysis and runtime compliance checks. Join this talk and bring your questions.

• DOP316-R1 and DOP316-R2 continuous integration strategies and best practices

In this chalk talk, learn about using continuous integration across your branches and pull-request workflows. Explore various considerations for monolith versus containerized applications, incorporating best practices like security checkpoints, generating test reports, integrating open-source packages, and more. Learn some build-optimization techniques with available tools and services. Lastly, evaluate integration into the GitOps model.

• DOP317 Application deployment strategies for AWS applications

This chalk talk covers deployment strategies, including blue/green, in-place, feature-flag, and canary deployments. It also explores strategies for working with data structure changes.

• DOP318 Deploying AWS Config conformance packs with RDK using AWS CodePipeline

In this chalk talk, learn how to use a simple pipeline to create custom AWS Config rules and deploy them across an AWS Organizations organization-using AWS Config, the AWS Developer Tools, the AWS Config Rule Development Kit (RDK), and RDKLib. During the talk, explore how to build, test, and deploy these rules at scale across multiple AWS accounts in a repeatable, secure, and automated way.

• DOP319-R1 and DOP319-R2 Choose your own adventure: AWS Java developer tooling

Are you a Java developer deploying applications to AWS? Do you wonder how you can improve your development cycle, be more productive, and deliver better-performing applications? During this highly interactive chalk talk, AWS experts adapt topics in real time to cover those that interest you the most. Choose from a range of options, from Java-specific integrations with popular services like Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB, to Java-focused IDE tooling to help you be more productive when you’re authoring code that runs on AWS. Also, review Amazon Corretto (open JDK) and Amazon CodeGuru as part of Java application development.

Level 400 – Expert

• DOP403-R1 and DOP403-R2 Maximize value with AWS CloudFormation advanced features

In this chalk talk, gain insights into AWS CloudFormation advanced features to transform the way you provision and manage your AWS and third-party resources. Discover how to use best practice plugins from the CloudFormation registry to create a CloudFormation template, use CloudFormation Guard to check the template for security and compliance errors, disable the rollback to accelerate provisioning, and use CloudFormation StackSets to provision resources in multiple AWS accounts and Regions.

Workshops

Workshops are two-hour interactive learning sessions where you work in small group teams to solve problems using AWS services. Each workshop starts with a short lecture (10–15 minutes) by the main speaker, and the rest of the time is spent working as a group. Come prepared with your laptop and a willingness to learn!

Level 200 – Intermediate

• DOP205-R1 and DOP205-R2 Build your infrastructure with AWS CloudFormation and the AWS CDK

In this workshop, learn how to build using infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation and the AWS CDK. Create resources using CloudFormation and learn about maintenance and operations tips. Also delve into using the AWS CDK to enable developers to utilize their choice of programming language to create infrastructure. The workshop walks you through the steps of coding and building your own constructs (or integrating solution constructs) and publishing them as shared libraries. Let’s build!

• DOP206 Improve availability and resilience with fault injection experiments

This workshop introduces you to chaos engineering. Learn how to improve the resiliency of applications and infrastructure using hypothesis-based experiments, disruption, and observation, including recurrent scenarios and CI/CD. Get hands-on with AWS Fault Injection Simulator and AWS Systems Manager to simulate outage scenarios, and learn how to combine this with observability tools like Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon DevOps Guru to uncover hidden issues, expose unseen areas, and validate remediation steps.

• DOP207 Improving development ergonomics for developers

In this workshop, get hands-on with developer tools on AWS including AWS IDE toolkits, SDKs, and CLIs to build a modern application. Learn how to easily and efficiently build, test, and debug a serverless application and explore modern tooling, including Amazon CodeGuru, AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) tooling, and managed environments, to rapidly prototype and debug secure applications in the cloud.

Level 300 – Advanced

• DOP306 Implementing release management strategies for CI/CD

This workshop guides you through building CI/CD pipelines with release-management best practices, including artifact management as well as zero-downtime release promotion and rollback mechanisms. Evaluate various rollback/roll forward strategies across compute types and assess the need for manual processes.

• DOP307-R1 and DOP307-R2 AWS CLI tips and tricks

In this workshop, learn AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) tips and tricks. Discover how to efficiently interact with your AWS services, manage your AWS resources, automate your regular repetitive operations, and utilize various use cases presented in this workshop. Join this workshop to hear about new feature functionalities integrated for developer operations.

• DOP320 Observability: Best practices for improving developer productivity

In this hands-on workshop, dive deep into how you can improve developer productivity by correlating metrics and traces to identify user impact from any source and to find broken or expensive code paths as quickly as possible. Learn how to do this with AWS services, without having to re-instrument code, when adding new observability tools to development workflows.

Level 400 – Expert

• DOP401-R1 and DOP401R2 Continuous security and compliance for your CI/CD pipeline

This workshop dives deep into the importance of and mechanisms for meeting security and compliance requirements for your organization. Learn ways that you can enforce pre- and post-deployment standards, shift-left testing, and use of services like Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer, AWS CloudFormation Guard, and AWS Config for security static analysis and runtime compliance checks. Join this talk and bring your questions.

In addition to these sessions, we offer leadership sessions through which you can hear directly from AWS leaders as they share the latest advances in AWS technologies, set the future product direction, and motivate you through compelling success stories. Also, expect to hear about the launch of new and exciting AWS services and features throughout the event.

Still looking for more?

We have an extensive list of curated content on DevOps on AWS, including case studies, white papers, previous re:Invent presentations, reference architectures, and how-to instructional videos. Subscribe to our AWS Developer Tools and Services channel to get updates when new videos are added.

About the author