Ah, remember how text alerts would go to our pagers and how cool it was to wake up at all hours of the night and have to sleep-shell into servers for emergency maintenance?

Yeah, blowing up a pager is so 90s.

Now it’s all about sending Tweets with twitter-lite-perl.

Here are the requirements [for software that actively “tweets” the status of the cloud for you and your co-sys.admins to follow]

Have a twitter account opened for this application.
Have a machine, or a virtual machine, running Linux with network capability.
Have the cloud admin’s credentials.
Have a smartphone with Twitter Client App installed.

Easy peasy. Very cool that a group all can see status from anywhere in the world for just the regular cost of a network connection. As long as Twitter itself is available you should be good to go.

An alerting system below “three nines” (99.9) isn’t much help if you are trying to use it to stay above. YouTube appears to be a better candidate; can we get some tube-lite-perl?

Wait, what? Did they say have the admin‘s credentials?

After verifying the test tweet, go to the directory “./pigeons_on_a_euca/credentials” and store your Eucalyptus cloud’s admin credentials

Oooh, must scan for world readable “euca/credentials” directories…

Another interesting detail to consider is the rate of messaging.

Warning: The amount of tweets generated by the application might be overwhelming; at its maximum rate, it will upload 350 tweets per hour.

That is almost as fast as Ashton Kutcher tweets. I mean when Twitter is available.