No idea what happens on AWS as I don't work there, but I have another perspective on this.
There are perverse incentives to NOT update your status dashboard. Once I was asked by management to _take our status dashboard down_ . That sounded backwards, so I dug a bit more.
Turns out our competitor was using our status dashboard as ammo against us in their sales pitch. Their claim was that we had too many issues and were unreliable.
That was ironic, because they didn't even have a status dashboard to begin with. Also, an outage on their system was much more catastrophic than an outage on our system. Ours was, for the most part, a control plane. If it went down, customers would lose management abilities for as long as the outage persisted. An outage at our competitor, meanwhile, would bring customer systems down.
We ended up removing the public dashboard and using other mechanisms to notify customers.
This sort of shit happens all the time at all levels. Companies use each other’s public specs in their competition all the time.
Or capitalizing on features like headphone jacks etc. in their ads before proceeding to remove them from their own products anyway (Samsung and Google) and so on.
You're missing the point. The point is that it isn't apple to apples. If you are honest with a dashboard, and the competitor isn't (or doesn't have one), it's not fair to compare.
GoGrid used to do this to Rackspace cloud back in the early cloud days. It always left a bad taste for me seeing a social campaign at customers who are currently down.
Imagine your competitors being a couple of smallish companies like Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. Oracle would sacrifice puppies live on YouTube if that would take AWS down a peg.
There are perverse incentives to NOT update your status dashboard. Once I was asked by management to _take our status dashboard down_ . That sounded backwards, so I dug a bit more.
Turns out our competitor was using our status dashboard as ammo against us in their sales pitch. Their claim was that we had too many issues and were unreliable.
That was ironic, because they didn't even have a status dashboard to begin with. Also, an outage on their system was much more catastrophic than an outage on our system. Ours was, for the most part, a control plane. If it went down, customers would lose management abilities for as long as the outage persisted. An outage at our competitor, meanwhile, would bring customer systems down.
We ended up removing the public dashboard and using other mechanisms to notify customers.