Real AWS DevOps practices from production: GitOps on EKS, OpenTelemetry, supply chain security, chaos engineering with FIS, and AI-assisted DevOps with Amazon Q.
Observability is not free, and the industry has collectively underpriced it. CloudWatch log ingestion, metrics explosion, and X-Ray trace volume can together exceed your compute bill — especially once AI workloads introduce high-cardinality telemetry at scale.
A 500ms latency spike in a distributed system could be a slow RDS query, a Lambda cold start, a downstream API timeout, or a CloudWatch Logs ingestion delay. Finding the cause requires correlated logs, traces, and metrics — not grep.
A practical guide to AWS CloudWatch for production observability — custom metrics, structured logging, alarm strategies, dashboards, and cost-effective monitoring patterns.