What it is
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus. Applications and AWS services publish events, and rules match those events and send them to targets such as Lambda functions, queues or other services. It grew out of CloudWatch Events and adds partner event sources from SaaS providers and a schema registry, so different systems can react to each other without being wired together directly.
Rules can also run on a schedule, using rate expressions like every five minutes or cron expressions for a set time, which makes EventBridge the usual way to run a task on a timer without a server. EventBridge Scheduler extends this with one-off and time-zone aware schedules at large scale.
How I use it
- A rate(5 minutes) rule triggers a Lambda in us-east-1 that probes every production system I run, including Rental Pilot and Lend Pilot.
- Results go to DynamoDB, the status page draws them, and a change from up to down, or back, reaches my phone.
- A second rule pulls the month-to-date AWS bill from Cost Explorer twice a day, which is as fresh as that data gets.
EventBridge is the right tool for a timer when there is no server to hold a cron job, or when the job should run outside the systems it checks. That second reason is why my status probes live there: a server that has fallen over cannot vouch for itself.
Questions
How do you monitor websites from outside the server?
An EventBridge schedule runs a Lambda every five minutes that probes each system over HTTPS. Because it runs in AWS, not on the servers it checks, a dead server cannot report itself healthy.
Can I get a status page like this for my business?
Yes. I set up checks from outside, a status page you can share with customers, and alerts to whoever needs to know.