Introducing LightPane — Live Cloud Discovery, Displayed Anywhere

Alistair McLaurin · March 2026

Today we are launching LightPane as a distinct product from Clouds and Light. LightPane is our service for live cloud infrastructure discovery — it queries your AWS, GCP, and Azure environments in seconds and renders the results as embeddable panes that you can place on any web page.

The idea behind LightPane comes from years of working in cloud infrastructure across some of the world's largest organisations. A pattern we observed repeatedly was that people make the best decisions when they are closest to accurate, live data. The more friction we introduce — emailing reports, waiting for screen shares on an incident call, requesting console access from another team — the worse our decisions become. Data gets stale. Context gets lost. People make assumptions instead of observations.

LightPane exists to remove that friction.

Why "LightPane"

The name reflects two ideas that are central to how the service works.

Light — because the service is designed to be lightweight and fast, but also because it brings transparency. Your cloud data belongs to you. LightPane makes it visible to everyone who needs it, without requiring console access, specialist knowledge, or a per-seat license. Adding live cloud data to a web page takes a few lines of code. No agents to install. No dashboards to learn.

Pane — because each view is an embeddable component, a pane of information designed to show the right amount of data exactly where you need it. EC2 instances on an incident page. S3 buckets on a compliance document. CloudWatch alarms on a status dashboard. Each pane renders the key information as fast as possible, with expandable detail for when you need to dig deeper.

Real-time incident management

One of the most powerful applications we have seen is incident management. When a production system is degraded, the first few minutes are critical. Twenty people join a bridge call, but only one or two have console access. Everyone else waits for verbal updates or a shared screen.

With LightPane, a team can build an application status page that shows live infrastructure state — what is running, what should be running, what changed recently, and whether costs or alarms look abnormal. During an incident, everyone opens the same page in their own browser. No screen sharing. No waiting. The same live data, visible to everyone at once.

We have built a working example of this. You can see it at our incident management demo — it includes live AWS data, health analysis, CloudWatch alarms, CloudTrail changes, and cost tracking on a single page.

Multi-cloud migration visibility

Another use case that demonstrates LightPane's unique capability is cloud migration. When an organisation is moving workloads from AWS to GCP (or any combination of providers), project managers need to see what is running in the source environment and what has been provisioned in the target — without switching between two consoles.

LightPane can display infrastructure from multiple cloud providers on the same page, using a single access key. Our cloud migration demo shows live data from both AWS and GCP side by side — networking, compute, storage, serverless functions, DNS, and identity — all discovered in under five seconds.

Nothing else in the market does this. Most tools collect cloud data and lock it into their own console. LightPane puts it wherever you need it.

See it working

The panes below are live. They are discovering real data from an AWS account and a GCP project right now, as you read this page.

AWS — S3 Buckets (live)
GCP — Cloud Storage Buckets (live)

These panes are identical to the ones in our demos. Adding them to this blog post took six lines of code each. That is what we mean by "display anywhere."

Cloud provider support

LightPane supports AWS, GCP, and Azure today, with 58 AWS services, 29 GCP services, and 20 Azure services available for live discovery. Oracle Infrastructure Cloud and Alibaba Cloud support are coming very soon, with service definitions already in development.

The full list of supported services and their attributes is documented at lightpane.io.

A free tier for individual users

We have not forgotten individual users. LightPane is launching with a free Explorer tier that gives you full access to one cloud account with all services included. There are no feature restrictions on the free tier — you get the same discovery engine, the same pane components, and the same API access as paying customers.

We have also built a Free Tier Monitor specifically for Explorer plan users. It gives you a visual overview of your AWS free tier usage — what you are consuming, what is still available, and where you are projected to exceed your limits before month end. The Free Tier Monitor is itself completely free. You can see a preview at our free tier monitor demo.

Available today for founding customers

Founding Customer Programme

LightPane is available today for founding customers. We will help you test and integrate the service at a discounted rate — 50% off for the first six months — in return for case studies and permission to reference your logo. If you are interested, drop us a message on the contact form and we will set up a call to discuss your requirements.

Full self-service sign-up for individuals and teams is coming in May 2026. In the meantime, you can register your interest and we will let you know as soon as it launches.

What comes next

We are working on several fronts. Oracle and Alibaba cloud provider support will extend our multi-cloud capability to five providers. Account groups with aliases will let enterprise customers manage multi-account environments without exposing cloud account IDs. Organisation-level security policies will give security teams control over how data is accessed across their organisation. And an intelligent caching layer will ensure that discovery stays fast regardless of how many people are viewing the same data.

Cloud data has been locked behind complex consoles for too long. LightPane is how we change that — live infrastructure data, discovered in seconds, displayed to everyone who needs it.

We would love to hear from you. Get in touch at support@cloudsandlight.com or use the contact form.

Alistair McLaurin is the founder of Clouds and Light. He spent 13 years in cloud infrastructure at AWS, JP Morgan, and HSBC before building LightPane. He also teaches Cloud Computing at Oxford University.

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