How Real-Time Is Amazon Cloudwatch Logs Live Tail?

author here. aws released amazon cloudwatch logs live tail (it is a mouthful) earlier this month. it enables 'real time' tailing of cw logs. given that cw logs has 5s-20s latency for ingestion, I was curious whether live tail made this better. ended up as a blog post

tldr: live tail is downstream of cloudwatch logs so you still have the same initial delay in first getting metrics. any logs, once ingested, will be pushed to live tail in ~2s. live tail uses websockets under the hood and is a console-first feature - there is no API