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Comment by QuiiBz | Hacker News Reader

I tried to monitor services status using https://stop.lying.cloud, but they are also hosted to AWS, and down too.

If they're monitoring AWS downtime they might want to rethink this.

How come? It's accurate.

True, if it is down, then that means AWS is down (not necessarily, obviously). :D But honestly, if they want to monitor AWS, they gotta pick something else for this reason, something that is not down when AWS is.

Well... Yes. Hahahah

Work smarter, not harder

I guess it depends on whether you like your FALSE's encoded as timeouts :)

AWS should monitor itself from Azure or GCP, even DO or Linode makes more sense.

Eat your own dog food shows confidence, but monitoring it is a different dimension, you need use anything but your own dog food there.

AWS wouldn't monitor itself from a competitor, of course, but they could just as well silo a team and isolate DCs to do independent self-auditing.

I don't know about AWS, but I know a lot of us uptime monitoring makers use (and pay) for competitor's products to know if we're down.

Rightly so. My point is a company can self-audit without having to pay a competitor.

Absolutely. And even if it’s cheaper to use the competition, an expensive custom solution will be found.

I think that is inherently riskier because you never know on what axis you will have a failure and it is difficult to exclude all shared axes.

That applies when you use competitors too.

They could have a related outage, or even a coincidentally timed one

But we're talking about a status page which should be basically static. In it's simplest form you need a rack in 2+ random colos and a few people to manage the page update framework. Then you make teams submit the tests that are used to validate SLA. Run the tests from a few DCs and rebuild the status page every minute or two.

Maybe add a CDN. This shit isn't rocket science and being able to accurately monitor your own systems from off infrastructure is the one time you should really be separate.

AWS wouldn't monitor itself from a competitor, of course

Why not? The big tech companies use each other all the time.

For example, set up a new firewall on macOS and you can see how many times Apple pulls data from Amazon or Azure or other competitors' APIs and services.

Apple is not a competitor to AWS or Azure in any way. They offer not infrastructure/platform as a service that I am aware of.

Apple and Amazon are competitors. Apple and Microsoft competitors.

The postulation was that Apple and Amazon weren't competitors. Not that they're not competitors in a specific niche.

But the idea that Amazon or Microsoft or Google would host anything at apple is pretty out there.

Apple uses their competitor's services because they can't build their own cloud and host their own shit. The big boys don't use competitors for services they are capable of building themselves.

And yet video.nest.com (Google) resolves to an Amazon load balancer.

They have a bazillion alexa and kindle devices out there that they could monitor from, heh heh. At least let that phone-home behaviour do something useful, like notice AWS is down.

It's the only realistic multi-cloud provider scenario I can ever come up with that I would consider actually implementing...

A similar reason drives businesses to host `status.product.bigcorp` on a different server. And if your product is a cloud then your suggestion makes sense.

Yeah, I homed https://stop.lying.cloud out of us-west-2. Oops.

The brand is strong if you’re really the owner

Considering the sea of bright green circles, reds might stand out but blues get lost in a fast scroll. Perhaps fade or mute the green icon to improve visibility of non-green which is the interesting information?

How does this service work?

It seems to have all the look and feel of AWS, and somehow has more up to date info than the official AWS status page?

It's the same info - it just changes all blues to yellows and all yellows to reds. :)

I had no idea!

Pretty funny actually.

Now that they're back up they're not reporting any problems, how is it supposed to work? It looks like it is just repeating the status reported on the Amazon status page.

It is. It's just the AWS status page run through a transformation function to:

1. Remove all the thousand green services that no one cares about when looking at AWS status

2. Upgrade all yellows to reds because Amazon refuses to list anything as "down" no matter how bad the outage is.

3. Insert a snarky legend

I mean, sounds like it's working as intended then?

Funny I didn't know that and assumed it was okay

That’s hilarious

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