How To Split An Atom

When Amazon went down a few weeks ago, after the shock settled, the first thing I wondered was whether S3 had gone with it. Hundreds of companies now exist in the cloud, and anything from a natural disaster to user error can cause hundreds of millions of dollar worth of lost service time. CloudStatus is a service that wants to help monitor these lifelines.

Cloud Status

The interface is simple. The site tests the “health” of a number of web services (for the moment, all of them are from Amazon). It then tells you at a glance whether these services are working, having service issues or have failed. It’s a quick way to figure out whether the source of your own application’s failure is coming within your system or from an outside agent.

I like this idea because as we become more reliant on external services, we’ll need more robust ways to monitor uptime. Extending this idea beyond data repositories, it would be useful to be able to see the “health” of all of the web services that many of us have come to rely on. Imagine being able to be notified anytime the server your blog is on or your favorite social messaging app ran on began to slow, and being given a general idea as to the cause and the time until the system would be restored.

CloudStatus won’t bring your web services back online, but it might just give you the information you need to respond to it effectively.

(Images) (News Room)

Read original blog post