Two years ago I created a personal project called lambda-overwatch, I wanted to check my sites were up, and I didn't want to pay anyone any money to do it. There was some interest in how I did it, and how people could replicate it.

The former was quite easy, but replicating what I had built was not easy, so coming back to the project nearly two years later I had some goals:

• Change the name - preferably one that wouldn't get me sued.
• Enable multi-region checks - Serverless doesn't really support multiple regions, but the requirement is clear, being able to ensure a check websites from multiple locations is a big deal.
• Make deploying your own checks simple - The configuration of lambda overwatch was not easy, at all, you basically had to take the building blocks I had assembled and rejig them how you wanted. The multi-region functionality also made simple installations even harder, so to really enable multi-region checks, configuration needed improving in general.
• Ad hoc checks - "Alexa check tegud.net is up"...
• Allow other notifiers - Don't just tell slack, send to alerting platform, send to a report, send to a webhook...

As ever this is a work in progress, but first the name then...

Lambda Overwatch is now Checkless

I still quite like the name Overwatch, and I'm not 100% on checkless, but I didn't really want a cease and desist off Blizzard and it was mildly confusing given the huge game the name shared, so Checkless then.

It may not stick forever, it may change again, because developers are bad at naming things, but for now it I believe it conveys that Checks are involved, and that it may be somehow related to serverless, which is the main thing for now.

It also has the major advantage of not being a hugely popular name on npm, which given the other goals was important.

Finally, Lambda is gone from the title, I'm looking multi-region for now, but why not multi cloud? Enabling checks from even more regions (and potentially using multiple free cloud allocations)!

What's next?

My goal for Checkless is for it to continually evolve, that's only possible if it's easier to deploy, more portable and less coupled to my own configuration (which the original lambda overwatch repository in Github was very much so).

Multi-region and configuration streamlining is mostly there, but the other goals are still to do, the list of posts below will be updated as more progress is achieved.

Checkless Blog Posts

But wait, there's more! I've only changed the name, there will soon be more Checkless blog posts so you can find out more, or setup your own free site check. Check back soon for more.

• Create your own Free Site Check with Checkless - Getting started with Checkless
• More as they come...

Checkless Repositories

Have a look at the checkless and checkless-cli repositories below if you want to jump straight to the code or getting started

• Checkless CLI - Generate, Estimate Cost and Deploy Checkless from the CLI (or automate it!)
• Checkless - base library, roll your own or contribute to the core modules.