Sometimes particular AWS Services will have an outage. The status of each service can be checked in real-time at https://status.aws.amazon.com/.
Although there are outage notification bots for common chat applications, such as Slack and HipChat, some workplaces block such apps on internal corporate networks
Each service has an RSS feed associated with it, which can be subscribed to for outage updates.
Outlook has a handy ‘RSS Feeds’ reader, for which these can be manually added.
The following is a guide to adding individual and lists of feeds to the Outlook RSS Feeds reader.
Step-by-step guide for adding individual feeds
- Navigate to https://status.aws.amazon.com/ in your favourite browser.
- Locate the AWS service for which you want to subscribe to outage notifications
- Right click on the RSS feed icon on the right-hand-side of the row
- Click ‘Copy link address’ from the context menu
- Open Outlook
- Under you account, right click on ‘RSS Feeds’
- Click ‘Add a New RSS Feed’ from the context menu
- Enter the URL of the RSS Feed, and click ‘Add’
- The RSS Feed will now be loaded into the ‘RSS Feeds’ section of the account
Step-by-step guide for adding a list of feeds
- Generate an OPM file with all of the feeds you with to subscribe to.
- Open Outlook.
- Under you account, right click on ‘RSS Feeds’.
- Click ‘Import an OPML File’ from the context menu
- Select the file (created in step 1) in the file selector dialog, and click ‘Next >’
- Click ‘Select All’ to select all of the listed feeds. (Alternatively, select the individual feeds you wish to subscribe to)
- Once all of the feeds have been added, click ‘Finish’
- Outlook will now fetch the RSS feeds, including historical content (this may take several minutes to complete).
I’ve created a few files for Sydney region services, as well as the global services – feel free to use these as a starting point for subscriptions (and let me know if I’ve missed anything!)