Raphael Manke
Senior Product engineer
Karlsruhe, Germany
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Raphael Manke is an AWS Hero and full-stack developer with many years of experience in developing applications in the AWS cloud. At Dash0 he is responsible for integrating AWS telemetry data into the platform.
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AWS Lambda Durable Functions: How They Work and How to Observe Them
AWS Lambda Durable Functions are a powerful new tool for orchestrating multi-step workloads — write sequential code, get built-in retries, checkpointing, and executions that run for up to a year, all without Step Functions or external orchestration.
But once you adopt them, a new question arises: how do I actually observe this? What's in the box?
AWS provides a solid starting point with execution-level metrics and lifecycle events. But distributed tracing is where the gaps show. X-Ray gives you per-invocation traces — not per-execution. And when you try to close that gap with OpenTelemetry, the checkpoint-and-replay model introduces real challenges: phantom spans from replay invocations, trace context that breaks at every freeze/resume boundary, and no semantic conventions to build on.
This talk covers how durable functions work, what observability AWS ships out of the box, and how to extend it — including what I learned trying to add proper OTel tracing to a runtime that replays your code.
Real-World OpenTelemetry Collector Extensions from Logs to Spans
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a powerful Swiss Army knife for observability, but extending it with custom components presents unique challenges. This talk shares practical lessons from building and operating custom OTel Collector extensions in production at an observability startup.
You'll learn the progression from basic usage to advanced customization: starting with the OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL) for sophisticated data manipulation, then understanding when custom components become necessary. Through a production example—a custom connector transforming CloudWatch logs into distributed traces via AWS Firehose—you'll see the architecture, code, and design decisions behind bridging logs and traces pipelines.
Critically, we'll cover the practical realities of extending the collector: building your own distribution with the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (ocb), managing dependencies, and the operational trade-offs. You'll leave with a decision framework for when to use OTTL versus custom code, and the confidence to extend the collector for your use cases.
Serverless Observability - less to manage, harder to observe?
In a world where serverless architecture promises less management but brings observability challenges, this talk offers a technical deep dive into achieving effective observability. We will explore the principles of observability with a focus on serverless environments, dissecting the importance of high cardinality, semantic conventions, and context propagation. Practical demonstrations with OpenTelemetry will highlight how to instrument your applications for better insight. The session will also critically compare the pros and cons of using cloud provider observability tools versus third-party platforms, taking into account factors such as simplicity, costs, and ongoing maintenance. Whether you're a DevOps engineer or a cloud architect, this talk equips you with the knowledge to optimize your observability strategy.
Supercharge Lambda functions with Powertools for AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda functions are a crucial part of serverless workloads in modern cloud architectures. They can be used for synchronous tasks, such as handling API calls, or for asynchronous tasks, like consuming SQS queues or DynamoDB streams. Lambda functions are designed to get the job done.
However, as a developer, using Lambda functions comes with its challenges. Cloud environments are prone to failures, and when dealing with a large number of lambda functions, there is often repetitive code that is not directly related to the business logic and is highly specific to AWS.
AWS Powertools is a library that helps address these challenges in your Lambda functions. It enhances your functions in areas such as observability, resiliency, and operational excellence.
In this talk, we will explore the capabilities of the Powertools library and demonstrate how it can supercharge your lambda functions by applying it to a real-world application. This will bring you closer to achieving the well-architected pillar in AWS.
Building Reliable Serverless Applications with AWS CDK and Testing
AWS CDK is an IaC (Infrastructure as Code) Framework that allows developers to easily create and manage serverless applications by combining various AWS resources such as Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB tables with just a few lines of code. While CDK greatly simplifies the process of building and deploying these types of applications, it is still important to verify that they are functioning as expected.
In this talk, we will delve into the different ways of testing CDK apps to ensure their reliability, using a real-world example to illustrate the concepts discussed. This will include a discussion of unit testing Lambda functions, snapshot testing, and fine-grained assertion testing of CDK stacks. We will also explore the importance of integration testing in gaining confidence in your application, and demonstrate how to split an application into smaller, more manageable components that can be deployed and tested individually.
By the end of this talk, attendees will have gained a thorough understanding of the various testing techniques available when working with CDK, and will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to confidently ensure the reliability of their serverless applications through effective testing practices.
Observability on AWS: The What, the How, and the Bill
You added CloudWatch. You enabled X-Ray. You deployed to production. Then the bill arrived.
Observability on AWS is deceptively easy to start and surprisingly expensive to run. Most developers instrument their applications without understanding the pricing model underneath — and discover the hard way that logs, metrics, traces, and transaction search each have their own cost dimensions that multiply at scale.
In this talk, we'll build a clear mental model from the ground up. First, we'll cover why observability matters for AWS developers — where managed services make production systems opaque and why you need telemetry to operate them safely. Then we'll trace exactly how telemetry data flows from your code to a backend, and where OpenTelemetry fits into the AWS ecosystem today. Finally, we'll walk through each cost dimension — CloudWatch Logs ingestion, metric cardinality, X-Ray sampling, Transaction Search, and data transfer — with concrete pricing examples and the traps that surprise teams at scale.
You'll leave with a pricing mental model and practical OTel Collector configurations you can apply immediately to reduce your observability spend without losing signal.
WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2024 Sessionize Event
AWS Community Day 2024 - Switzerland Sessionize Event
AWS Community Lounge at AWS Summit Berlin 2024 Sessionize Event
AWS Community Day Poland 2024 Sessionize Event
AWS Community Day DACH 2023 Sessionize Event
WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2023 Sessionize Event
AWS Community Lounge at AWS Summit Berlin 2023 Sessionize Event
Raphael Manke
Senior Product engineer
Karlsruhe, Germany
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