Fudge Sunday - Cloud in Public: Status Dashboards

This week we take a look at public things for a public cloud.

☁️✅⚠️🛑

This issue is part 1 of a 5 part series

A look back at this week in…

This week let’s take a look at the history and evolution of the public status dashboard and what this means for the public cloud. We’ve come a long way but there is more to come in terms of transparency, personalization, and relevance.☁️✅⚠️🛑

Earlier this week, I came across this Twitter thread and blog post from @cloudpundit. In a nutshell, ☁️ service provider transparency:

Publicly👏Document👏All👏The👏Things👏

This week in this issue, we’ll only be focusing on Status Dashboards as the first issue of five to come.🤓

Cloud historians point back to 2006 as the time of Amazon Web Services (AWS) entering the market. By 2008, AWS Service Health Dashboard was announced as a way to “provides access to current status and historical data about each and every Amazon Web Service”.

Originally, AWS Service Health Dashboard almost fit on one page scroll in a web browser. Today, AWS Service Health Dashboard involves scrolling multiple times per page and multiple regional tabs with their own scrolling multiple times per page.

The look of the 2008 AWS Service Health Dashboard was simple, clean, and brief with only nine (9!) services. (via Wayback Machine)

By 2010, a status dashboard was becoming an expectation for customers of various “as a service” companies. Customers wanted to know if something was wrong with their Internet connect or if a service was truly having issues. See also: Social Telecom (2010) and Social Telecom 2030.

By 2016, status dashboards were commonly referred to as status pages. You can even find GitHub repositories that simply documented all the awesome status pages in existence – and those curate list repositories also saw forks!

By 2018, DevOps was almost a 10 year old concept. By late 2018, DevOps would come to decorate the names of status dashboards.

Today, public cloud status dashboards are a more accurate way to think of an exhaustive status page. As compared to a simple SaaS company status page, a hyperscale public cloud service provider can have thousands of services that require a status report meaning many status pages must be represented in a status dashboard.☁️✅⚠️🛑

As one might expect, a personalized status page approach would filter and summarize the pertinent information to a specific customer. However, a personalized status page approach is a very recent concept in even in 2021.

In fact, only two (2!) hyperscale public cloud service providers offer a truly personalized status page at this time whereas. As for the others, the approach is decidedly do it yourself (DIY).

Historically, AWS launched Personal Health Dashboard in 2016 as a premium service while Azure launched Service Health in 2017 as a preview that became generally available in 2018 – at no additional cost.

Now, to round out this issue, reflect back to the five (5) areas that @cloudpundit outlined. It’s worth noting that beyond dashboard variation, there are still clear variations between hyperscale public cloud service providers today but those won’t possibly fit into this issue – hence the remaining issues in a series of issues to come.🤓

If you read this far, when you think about a multicloud journey, keep Faction in mind as a means to maximize access to hyperscale public cloud service provider innovations. Also… We’re hiring at Faction!🎉 See a fit for you or someone in your network? Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

I’ve been enjoying a few new newsletters – please check them out as well!

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