Keeping the eye on the tiger (or cloud) [monitoring services/cloud]

I called it.

I saw this coming based on a previous blog post on how all of the cloud based services seem to be reaching critical mass – and shutting off inadvertantly – without much notice. Well, as Stephen King says, everything is eventual.

CloudStatus (courtesy of Hyperic) has made it’s appearance and it is well placed to be the all-in-one free monitoring service of choice. Currently, this appropriately named CloudStatus watches over the suite of cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It offers a pretty simple, yet detailed graph view of what is running, where the peaks are, and it updates its metrics every 90 seconds.

It offers a detailed line graph for each respective service from AWS, that covers latency, throughput, lag response, query response times, and the list goes on. With a simplified dashboard, you can grab a summary of each service and quickly report rather or not a service is “green” or dead on arrival.

I am looking forward to more of these web monitoring services to crop up, since this entire cloud ride is in it’s infancy, and more services may come about to support this ever evolving cloud as Amazon becomes a shadow on the number of services that may crop up.

Link: CloudStatus (Beta)

Answer (test) this? Why is the price of automobile oil lower then gas?[a none QA rant]

Oil per barrel is at an all time high. How is it that the same oil used to make gasoline is sold at auto shop stores and gas stations throughout America (and in other countries) at a consistent price (sometimes at discount), while gas prices rise with the price of oil? I have no answer for this, so I sit puzzled at this strange price mechanism, glaring at it like a jumbled 40-foot Rubric’s cube.

This price discrepancy raises another question. Why are the rules that apply to price speculation and market regulation set to early industrialization models? These rules are out dated and need to be revisited to reflect current modern price structures for a global economy - so that when speculators raise the price of gas, they have to raise the price of gas for real tangible reasons, like supply and demand. I’m not an economic wunderkind, but this seems like common sense to me.

I offer this rant only because of my career, which requires me to travel by car some great distances. I am feeling the pinch, and it is getting tighter and tighter by the day. I love tech and I love science, and it amazes me that economics (which many consider a science) is more like an endless, wild roller coaster, thundering into the abyss without safety harnesses, or an emergency stop button.