Yesterday while I was waiting, along with hundreds of other server guys, for Amazon Web Services to restore service on one of their Virginia availability zones, I kept referring to their status page, where they have kind of an ad hoc method of accumulating information about the outages.

I had nothing better to do than stare at this, and it gave me an idea. Why not systematize it? They have a feed for every service. And my aggregator produces a fairly usable readout, imho of course. :-)

So I wrote a script to pull out all the feeds from the Amazon page, and loaded them into River2 running on one of my servers (hosted at Rackspace, so it won't go down when Amazon goes down), and started running. It looks pretty good. So here it is.

You might want to bookmark it and have a look whenever you're wondering what's going on at Amazon.