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Amazon WorkSpaces Connection Health Check

What it is

Amazon WorkSpaces Connection Health Check is a public-facing AWS diagnostic web page (clients.amazonworkspaces.com/Health.html) that measures round-trip-time (RTT) from the visitor's browser to each AWS region and displays which region is the recommended (lowest-RTT) one for a WorkSpaces session.

It is intended for end users troubleshooting WorkSpaces client connectivity, but it has become a de-facto public RTT reference that engineers can use to anchor RTT numbers to their own location.

Why it shows up in timeout guidance

Zalando's timeouts post cites the page as a calibration anchor for the "derive connection timeout from measured RTT" discipline:

"You can also look at Connection Health Check by Amazon. This is what I get from my local machine, RTT 28 ms to the recommended AWS Region." (Source: sources/2023-07-25-zalando-all-you-need-to-know-about-timeouts)

The 28 ms number is the author's measured RTT to their recommended region, cited verbatim as a grounding example for the RTT × 3 heuristic.

Why this is useful for wiki / documentation

Many timeout discussions cite RTT numbers without a way for the reader to verify them from their own context. The WorkSpaces Health Check page provides:

  • A public URL that doesn't require an AWS account.
  • Per-region RTT values measured fresh.
  • A "recommended region" signal that reflects routing conditions at test time.

Zalando's inclusion of the specific 28 ms number from this tool is an example of using a public, reproducible measurement as a grounding citation instead of a hand-waved RTT estimate.

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