>>How do you reduce the status of millions of machines, the software they run, and the interconnected-ness of those systems to a single graphical indicator?
There's a limitless variety of options, and multiple books written about it. I can recommend the series "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte, for starters.
>> Literally there are hundreds of things broken every minute of every day. On-call engineers are working around the clock...
Of course there are, so a single R/Y/G indicator is obviously a bad choice.
Again, they could at any time easily choose a better way to display this information, graphs, heatmaps, whatever.
More importantly, the one thing that should NOT be chosen is A) to have a human in the loop of displaying status, as this inserts both delay and errors.
Worse yet, to make it so that it is a VP-level decision, as if it were a $1million+ purchase, and then to set the policy to keep it green when half a continent is down... ummm that is WAAAYYY past any question of "threshold" - it is a premeditated, designed-in, systemic lie.
>>You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Look in the mirror, dude. While I haven't worked inside AWS, I have worked in complex network software systems and well understand the issues of thousands of HW/SW components in multiple states. More importantly, perhaps it's my philosophy degree, but I can sort out WHEN (e.g., here) the problem is at another level altogether. It is not the complexity of the system that is the problem, it is the MANAGEMENT decision to systematically lie about that complexity. Worse yet, it looks like those lies on an everyday basis are what goes into their claims of "99.99+% uptime!!" evidently false. The problem is at the forest level, and you don't even want to look at the trees because you're stuck in the underbrush telling everyone else they are clueless.