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title: "AWS re:Invent: Key themes in a nutshell | Mission Infrastructure Newsletter"
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We walk you through re:Invent 2025’s key themes with a selection of articles to keep you up to date.

| View in browser Hi there! We’re at peak AWS re:Invent — which means attendees are right in the middle of a schedule of more than 2,000 technical sessions, with generative AI featured in some 600 of them. It might seem impossible to keep abreast of what’s happening, but we’ve highlighted five themes and trawled through our recent articles to pair the best with some of the sessions that caught our eye: Theme #1: Observability & Cloud Operations FEATURED ARTICLE 11 Key Observability Best Practices You Should Know in 2025 The re:Invent schedule is heavy on cloud operations and AI-driven operations sessions, so this piece provides a practical checklist for what robust observability should look like in real AWS environments — logs, metrics, traces, SLOs, and how to keep things debuggable as your architecture gets more distributed.   Pair this article with Top 12 Cloud Provisioning Tools in 2025 for an overview of how to actually spin up and manage the infrastructure you’re observing. AWS RE:INVENT SESSIONS TO ATTEND COP326 – Elevate application and generative AI observability (Breakout) Dec 3 \| 2:30–3:30 PM PST \| Wynn This session demonstrates how to achieve end-to-end observability for both classic apps and gen-AI workloads using CloudWatch. COP336 – Elevating application reliability (Breakout) Dec 3 \| 4:00–5:00 PM PST \| MGM Attendees learn how to build and maintain resilient infrastructure using AWS native services, such as CloudWatch, Systems Manager, CloudTrail, and AI-assisted diagnostics. COP412 – Observability: The open source way (Workshop) Dec 3 \| 3:30–5:30 PM PST \| Venetian This session provides practical, hands-on experience with Prometheus, OpenSearch, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry on AWS. Theme #2: Kubernetes Metrics & EKS FEATURED ARTICLE Kubernetes Metrics: Types, Tools, & Monitoring Guide With EKS and containers featuring prominently on the re:Invent agenda, this article is a great companion: It breaks down which Kubernetes metrics actually matter (for capacity, performance, and reliability) instead of just throwing more dashboards at you. Think of it as a sanity check for all the EKS tuning ideas circulating during the week. AWS RE:INVENT SESSIONS TO ATTEND COP418 – Monitor the quality and accuracy of your generative AI workloads (Code Talk) Dec 4 \| 2:00–3:00 PM PST \| Wynn In this live coding session, attendees will build agentic applications using Bedrock AgentCore app running on Amazon EKS, instrumented via ADOT, and observed with CloudWatch’s gen-AI dashboards. COP367 – Design effective Amazon CloudWatch dashboards and alarms (Chalk talk) Dec 3 \| 3:00–4:00 PM PST \| Mandalay Bay This session explores capabilities in CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, so you can design appropriate visibility and actions for your workloads. CNS417 – Networking and observability strategies for Kubernetes” (Breakout) Containers/EKS track: Various times available This breakout session will cover comprehensive approaches to observing and securing multi-tenant environments, as well as gaining deep visibility into distributed workloads at scale. Theme #3: Platform Engineering & Metrics FEATURED ARTICLE How to Track Platform Engineering: Metrics & KPIs You will have noticed that many of the serverless/containers and DevOps sessions highlight platform engineering as the way to scale delivery. This article focuses on the key metrics to monitor to establish whether your internal platform is working: developer experience, adoption and usage, reliability and performance, and business value — the same themes you’ll hear in platform and IDP talks at re:Invent. If you’re exploring AWS-native options like Proton to templatize your services/platforms, check out AWS Proton: What It Is, How It Works & What’s Next for background. AWS RE:INVENT SESSIONS TO ATTEND COP350 – Building and validating cloud controls with generative AI (Breakout) Dec 3 \| 4:00–5:00 PM PST \| Caesars Forum In this technical session, attendees will learn about gen-AI-assisted authoring and validation of controls through Config, Control Tower, and CloudTrail. You’ll find this one great for  “are our platform guardrails working?” metrics. COP411 – Intelligent automation for managing cloud governance and compliance (Builders) Dec 4 \| 11:30 AM–12:30 PM PST \| Mandalay Bay This session focuses on creating automated workflows, wiring Config, Security Hub, and Audit Manager to provide context-aware insights for efficient policy enforcement and risk management. This is a good one for platform teams that own governance. CNS301-R/R1 – Accelerate platform engineering on Amazon EKS (Workshop) Various times available This is the perfect EKS platform session. Theme #4: Terraform Scanning & Policy-as-Code FEATURED ARTICLE Top 7 Terraform Scanning Tools You Should Know in 2025 The security track this year is big on securing and leveraging AI and building a stronger security culture. IaC scanning is one of the simplest ways to shift security left for AWS environments, and this article walks through the tools and approaches you can plug into your pipelines so misconfigurations never reach production. For more Terraform-heavy setups, How to Manage Dependencies Between Terraform Resources and Nested For\_Each in Terraform: Dynamic Blocks & Flattening show how to structure complex configs cleanly so your scans actually stay maintainable. And if you’re experimenting beyond Terraform, this OpenTofu CLI cheat sheet is a handy reference. AWS RE:INVENT SESSIONS TO ATTEND COP406 – Build and automate policy as code (Builders) Dec 3 \| 10:00–11:00 AM PST \| MGM This session covers exactly what Terraform/OpenTofu scanning readers care about: PaC pipelines, pre-commit checks, and custom org-level rules. COP310 – Automating compliance and auditing at scale (Workshop) Dec 3 \| 9:00–11:00 AM PST \| Mandalay Bay Attendees will get hands-on training in using Config, Systems Manager, Audit Manager, and CloudTrail Lake to build automated infrastructure compliance controls. COP352 – From Reactive to Proactive: Infrastructure governance by design (Code talk) Dec 4 \| 3:30–4:30 PM PST \| MGM This code talk focuses on best practices for using CloudFormation Hooks and CloudFormation Guard to block non-compliant infrastructure before it’s created. Theme #5: ClickOps vs Operations as Code FEATURED ARTICLE What is ClickOps? Risks & Alternatives Re:Invent keynotes love to hammer home the importance of repeatable, well-architected, secure cloud operations — which is basically the opposite of ClickOps. This article explains why ClickOps anti-pattern is risky at scale and points you back toward GitOps-enabled infrastructure as code as a far superior alternative. AWS RE:INVENT SESSIONS TO ATTEND COP409 – Building Sovereign Cloud Environments (Code talk) Dec 3 \| 2:30–3:30 PM PST \| Wynn Attendees will learn how Control Tower and Landing Zone Accelerator centrally support key sovereignty requirements, including country-specific compliance frameworks, regional service selection, automated controls for data movement, and cross-border transfers. COP349 – Balancing agility and compliance feat. The Japan Digital Agency (Breakout) Dec 3 \| 4:00–5:00 PM PST \| MGM This session covers how the Japanese government successfully implemented a centralized governance model for cloud adoption, using  Cloud Governance services like Control Tower, Config, and Security Hub. COP346 – Governance that Enables Innovation at Scale feat. Eli Lilly (Breakout) Dec 3 \| 3:30–5:30 PM PST \| Venetian This session focuses on how the U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly modernized their governance structure by migrating to Control Tower and integrating Account Factory for Terraform to automate provisioning, increase agility, enhance security posture, and innovate quickly. Launching December 10, 2025 — The Bald Truth “Infrastructure rarely breaks because of bad tools, it breaks because of untested assumptions. Subscribe to learn my hard-won lessons from scaling systems at Facebook and Google, the highs and lows of co-founding OpenTofu and Spacelift, and everything in between.” Marcin Wyszynski, Co-founder @ Spacelift & OpenTofu Subscribe Product Updates 🚀 Introducing Space Admin role for Non-Root Spaces You can now assign the Space Admin role to users for non-root spaces, so that non-root Space Admins can view all roles, users, API keys, IdP group mappings (read-only), and manage role bindings within their assigned administered spaces.  --> Learn more Introducing Plugins Spacelift now supports a variety of plugins that can be used to perform actions such as sending notifications, managing resources, or integrating with external systems. A template gallery is available with several great tools. --> Learn more Introducing Advanced Stack Roles Previously, you could set a stack as Administrative in order to manage resources in other stacks, but only in Spaces on the same branch. Stack Roles enable stacks that can manage resources across any spaces, even when not in the same branch. --> Learn more Get Started with Spacelift Ready to start your journey to IaC orchestration? Schedule a demo or explore yourself with a Spacelift free trial. Book a demo Start for free About  •  Terms of service  •  Contact Spacelift, Inc., 541 Jefferson Ave STE 100, Redwood City, California 94063 Unsubscribe Manage preferences |
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