AWS never ceases to amaze me with how many developer tools they can pump out. The latest one I discovered is the AWS CloudWatch Synthetic Canaries. Basically they are small integration tests that run at specific intervals in a lambda to ensure your site is running smoothly.

To be transparent: I have NOT used this in a production project yet but will likely be implementing them on a client project soon. I might add it to Schematical.com and SchematicalConsulting.com in the near future but right now I am just getting my bearings.

The default “Blueprint”, which is basically the lambda code, comes with puppeteer meaning that it is meant to crawl your HTML pages and make actions like a user would. It then takes the results of those actions on your webpage and sends them to CloudWatch Metrics. This means you can set a CloudWatch Alarm to go off if it errors out even once or if the webpage takes too long to complete an action.

Of course Terraform is on it with their own Synthetics Canary modules.

AWS Canaries might be worth using even if most of your infrastructure is NOT on AWS to monitor the health and up time of your website. It could be a good way of hedging your bets as it is less likely that AWS will go down at the same time as another large hosting provider.

So there you go. One more tool to keep your Cloud Infrastructure running smoothly.

PS: If you are interested in engaging my services as a Web Application Architect check out my Group Coaching Program or 1 on 1 Consulting at schematical.com and check out my FREE eBook 20 Things You Can DoTo Save Money On Your Amazon Web Services Bill Today