Chances are, you've heard one of the main promises of serverless compute: "you only pay for what you use". While convenient when starting a new project, once you start to get continuous usage on that compute, you start to realize you're paying a hefty premium for that convenience. If you're using AWS Lambda like I am, chances are that "for what you use" part isn't completely true either.

A quieter month this time around: you can now customize your status pages, there are additional overall statuses for status pages, and I fixed a few bugs.

This month I continued adding features to OnlineOrNot's status page functionality, while also taking the time to fix bugs, and add an integration for Pingdom.

If you remember the last update, I originally planned to ship quite a few features in June. Life and family had to take priority for me, so they didn't get done. Thankfully, I'm building OnlineOrNot for the extremely long term, so there's no rush to ship as fast as possible. A fair few things did get shipped though.

In May I mostly took the time to plan out the rest of the year, as well as one big feature to make OnlineOrNot's incident management more realistic.

In April I kept focusing on making Status Pages better than ever, and added a new on-call integration: incident.io.

March was a fun month for OnlineOrNot. I spoke to more customers than ever before, developed a long roadmap for OnlineOrNot's status page functionality (it's going to be an even better stand-alone product), heartbeat checks are going to support cron expressions, and more.

Incidents are a stressful time for your team: your service isn't working the way you expect and your customers/stakeholders want to know what's going on. The last thing you want to do is let your team improvise everything when it comes to responding to incidents. Google's own SRE book has great overall tips for incident management, part of which involves "develop(ing) and document(ing) your incident management procedures in advance", which this article dives into.

Over December and January I focused on OnlineOrNot's public API, making it possible to see what OnlineOrNot saw when it detected a failing uptime check, as well as fixing bugs and cleaning up tech debt across all of OnlineOrNot (it's getting faster and faster to release updates).

You might be thinking “building HTTP API docs from scratch? in 2024? wtf?”, and you’re probably right. After all redoc has been around since 2016, and there are hundreds of “generate beautiful documentation from your OpenAPI spec” startups around, some even use AI now. To be honest, I didn’t even know it was possible to do-it-yourself when I started looking into it.