O11y & Infrastructure AI Marathon

Yesterday I attended the O11y & Infrastructure AI Marathon - Portland ‘25. Despite my 10+ years experience doing software development, there are still abbreviations and terms I haven’t heard before, and O11y was one of them (it means “Observability” btw, the O followed by 11 characters, and then y).

The event was hosted by AWS Elemental in Portland. Elemental was a video encoding software startup acquired by AWS back in 2015, and now the building hosts 1 floor for the Elemental team, and a few more floors for other teams (agentic AI, appsec, and others). I learned Amazon Retail also has some office space down the street, about 4 floors.

The event was organized by New Relic and featured some folks from New Relic to talk about their IDP product. I was interested in catching Danielle Heberling’s (AWS serverless hero) presentation on AI tooling, but I could only catch half of Travis Hoffman’s (Senior Exec Advisor at Confluent) presentation “The Art of structuring real-time data streams into actionable insights”. Lots of Kafka basics in the first half at least. Had to jet for band practice!