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Amazon EC2-Classic Is Retiring
- juliansimioni 5y agoAs someone who first used AWS in mid-2009 (just a few weeks before VPCs were announced!), but hasn't used an EC2 Classic enabled AWS account now since around 2012, it's hard to remember just how far the service has come. There were only a few instance types, and they were all slow and small (by todays standards). Everyone's EC2 instances were mostly publicly pingable/ssh-able from the internet. EBS was horribly horribly slow (our DBAs set up a super convoluted RAID 0+1 configuration for our MySQL databases and even then we needed massive sharding to keep up with growth). EC2 instances were, in general, very unreliable (I recall something like 1 in 500 instances failing _per week_), and especially so in the leadup to Christmas (where the rumor was AWS kept the best instances for themselves). This is pretty much the first time I've heard of AWS really deprecating something, so I have a feeling it will _hugely_ simplify things on their end. From reading the post I also get the idea that it won't be _that_ hard of an operation from their side. I bet few people (by AWS standards) are still using EC2 classic heavily.
- jedberg 5y ago> This is pretty much the first time I've heard of AWS really deprecating something, I think the only other service that was ever deprecated was SimpleDB, which was replaced with DynamoDB.
- mikeocool 5y agoYou can actually still use SimpleDB: https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
- jedberg 5y agoThe documentation still exists, but you can't launch it anymore.
- psanford 5y agoWhat? Yes you can. I know because I just created a new domain today.
- jedberg 5y agoInteresting. Looks like you're right. I guess they changed their mind on depreciation. Six years ago at Netflix we had to move all of our SimpleDB domains to DynamoDB because they told us they were shutting down SDB. They also removed it from the console. But apparently you can still use it from the command line. So yeah, you're right, it's still there.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago> This is pretty much the first time I've heard of AWS really deprecating something Amazon has deprecated and then put to the grave multiple payment services. Torrent support in S3 is being killed off with little notice.
- duskwuff 5y ago> Torrent support in S3 is being killed off with little notice. Did anyone ever seriously use it? It never made much sense to me -- if you're trying to optimize for performance, S3 is already pretty good and a CDN can make that even better; if you're trying to optimize for cost, you wouldn't be using S3 in the first place.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoIf you have a paid service that requires guaranteed delivery but want to offset a portion of the cost, it made sense. The problem is that BitTorrent is not trivial to integrate into non-torrent applications.
- jitl 5y agoAt Airbnb, we considered using it for downloading deployment artifacts like app tarballs and search indexes within our cluster, back when we did deploys to stateful instances. The complexity was never worth it, though, and in the end we moved to Kubernetes anyways.
- murgindrag 5y agoI never used it, seriously or otherwise, but I appreciated having it there: 1) Universal torrent support is prerequisite to broad adoption. Having S3 be part of that network is nice. 2) It gives a fallback to exploding costs if something I do goes viral. I have the option of a weekend hackathon. ... and so on. It's one of those features I like even if I don't use. (And no, that's not actually common of features -- most of AWS, I wouldn't mind if it was not there)
- bpodgursky 5y agoAs discussed on that thread, nobody used S3 torrents.
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoI was in a tiny startup, but we could spin up a cluster of 250 c1.xlarge for $200 an hour! 2000 Cores!!!
- adrusi 5y agoI worked for AWS, specifically on a backend component specific to EC2 Classic, until late last year, and this will definitely simplify things on Amazon's end. There were, as of last year, still some large customers using Classic. It's not just a drop in the bucket compared to VPC, though definitely quite a bit smaller.
- unixhero 5y agoWhat I don't understand, and perhaps you may help me understand; is what powers the backend of AWS? Mainframes?
- carlhjerpe 5y agoDepending on the service, but mainly a whole bunch of custom x86 machines. If you search you'll find nuggets about all 4 hyperscalers and what they're doing. I know Amazon went the route of building their own smart NICs with both network and IO capabilities early (The same thing Nvidia is doing and calling revolutionary since last year) They rack more servers per day than I could afford in a lifetime.
- EwanToo 5y agoWatch this video from 2016 by James Hamilton at AWS Re:Invent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA It'll tell you lots about how AWS is built
- jsjohnst 5y ago> is what powers the backend of AWS? Full exact technical details aren't shared, but there are some videos on Youtube which touch on it their customized x86 and ARM server racks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6WlzHLxNKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6WlzHLxNKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukWig2QLCWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukWig2QLCWM
- dragonwriter 5y ago> This is pretty much the first time I've heard of AWS really deprecating something Amazon has deprecated several things, they tend not to actually retire them (just reduce thei public profile so people aren't tempted to build new instances, while supporting the existing users indefinitely.)
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoBy that metric, then, EC2-Classic has been for nearly 8 years. Accounts created after 2013 couldn't create classic instances.
- treesknees 5y ago>All AWS accounts created after December 4, 2013 are already VPC-only, unless EC2-Classic was enabled as a result of a support request. By default. You could still request it to be enabled on your account by contacting support.
- karmelapple 5y agoDo they publicly deprecate them? OpsWorks seems to have been silently deprecated for years, but I sure wish they would have told us that awhile ago. Our sales contact could never give us a straight answer on that.
- kesor 5y agoYep, SimpleDB comes to mind. Released in 2009, last updated circa 2012. Since DynamoDB was released it has been very silent on the SimpleDB front.
- yuppie_scum 5y agoThe Jeff Barr? Cool!
- slownews45 5y agoHoly crap - is this one of the first actual depreciation and get off service things AWS has done? Kind of crazy honestly? They were kind of famous for NOT doing this sort of thing - at all. GCP just announced enterprise API's I see with some (pretty vague) promises about longevity.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoYou’re generally right but it’s definitely not a hard rule. Amazon/AWS has deprecated and then put to the grave multiple payment services. I made that same comment when SimpleDB was deprecated and someone said the same thing. More recently, torrent support in S3 is being killed off with little notice.
- CraftThatBlock 5y agoIIRC, the S3 torrent deprecation announcement was in 2016, the recent announcement was based on API documentation cleanup
- slownews45 5y agoThe thing has been that historically even though Amazon would "depreciate" a service they kept it running and supported. "Amazon SimpleDB (N. Virginia) Service is operating normally" is their current status page, but their marketing materials doesn't show any SDB stuff. So if you had some old workload ticking over - you could just leave it usually. I actually used SimpleDB in a light use case wildly past the point at which it disappeared from all marketing. I kept on expecting an email like the EC2-classic one, but it never came even though simpleDB didn't show up anywhere really
- bgentry 5y agoFYI, "depreciate" != "deprecate" — I also used to think it was the former once upon a time :)
- jonplackett 5y ago
- paulddraper 5y agoWow. They did it. They finally did it.
- paulddraper 5y agoHijaking this to say I hate VPC. I hate VPC. Applying 1990s NATting to next gen cloud service? Gotta give the greybeards something to do. The purpose of NATting is to deal with limited IP addresses, a problem that has been solved for a long time now. AWS makes me create a VPC, but I certainly don't set up some central-point-of-failure NAT or pay AWS to do it.
- res0nat0r 5y agoAre you talking about instances you want completely isolated with no public IP addresses and only RFC1918 IP's, but can reach out to the internet? Nat Gateway has been around for ~6 years now and is highly available and a managed service so you just need to click a couple of buttons. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2015/12/introducing-amazon-vpc-nat-gateway-a-managed-nat-service/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2015/12/introduci...
- wyldfire 5y agoThis is probably dismissed by the "or pay AWS to do it" clause.
- mwcampbell 5y agoAt $0.045/hour, NAT gateways are expensive. This sets up perverse incentives, as it's cheaper to keep wasting public IPv4 addresses. If anyone from AWS is watching, I suggest that you make the base fixed price of NAT gateways way cheaper, and maybe add a small extra charge for EC2 instances and Fargate tasks with public IPs.
- orf 5y agoIt’s $30 per month, which is not expensive and is gonna be a rounding error to most users.
- terom 5y agoYou need one of those per AZ, and multiples of that if you split up projects across VPCs or AWS accounts. AWS accounts and VPCs are free, so NAT gateways can form a significant part of the per-account/VPC base cost, which can be a significant part of your total cost for a small project/environment.
- buggeryorkshire 5y ago#KilledByAWS ?
- kawsper 5y agoAre classic loadbalancers going away, or are they just listed because they might be affected by EC2-Classic going away?
- kstrauser 5y agoThey don't seem to be going away. The linked document says: > Option 4: Migrate manually to a Classic Load Balancer in a VPC > The following information provides general instructions for manually creating a new Classic Load Balancer in a VPC based on a Classic Load Balancer in EC2-Classic. You can migrate using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or an AWS SDK. For more information, see Tutorial: Create a Classic Load Balancer in the User Guide for Classic Load Balancers.
- amerine 5y agoNope. They are still around.
- JoshTriplett 5y agoI'm glad to see this. Whenever I see this kind of deprecation at a company not normally known for deprecating things, I'd tend to guess it's being removed to make way for something else. I look forward to new network functionality being unlocked or optimized or simplified by not having to worry about how it interacts with non-VPCs.
- mdaniel 5y agoToward that end, I wonder if this announcement and the new VPC IP prefix list announcement are related: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/amazon-virtual-private-cloud-vpc-customers-can-assign-ip-prefixes-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/amazon-vi...
- arriu 5y agoAnyone here actually using EC2-classic? If so, what has been the reason for not upgrading?
- saurik 5y agoSix months ago I left the following comment about this. > I miss EC2 Classic :/. It always feels like the entire world of VPCs must have come from the armies of network engineers who felt like if the world didn't support all of the complexity they had designed to fix a problem EC2 no longer had--the tyranny of cables and hubs and devices acting as routers--that maybe they would be out of a job or something, and so rather than design hierarchical security groups Amazon just brought back in every feature of network administration I had been happily prepared to never have to think about ever[] again :(. There were some responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25988915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25988915 Honestly and likely overly-frankly, I have absolutely nothing positive to say about VPC or any of the engineers who worked on or with it: it seems like it is uninspired and creates complexity out of whole cloth with absolutely no benefits I have ever heard of to redeem its existence. For a long time, instances could not have multiple security groups, which limited the mechanism... but that was fixed long ago; security groups should simply have been made hierarchical instead of forcing everyone to think about network layout and address space limitations as part of manually laid-out networking in what should be a purely cloud resource capable of infinite extension... all of that networking equipment and subnet numbering exists in the real world to solve problems virtual hardware does not and should not have. EC2 Classic was "fun" to work with and yet had no limits... VPC is "work" and offers nothing in return.
- res0nat0r 5y agoCreating completely private networks in a public cloud, and also being able to link these networks across the WAN to other private networks in different regions seems the opposite of nothing to offer IMO.
- jiggawatts 5y agoThis is a common error of conflating the name of something with a property that that name typically has. The "RFC 1918 private range" is "private". A publicly routeable range that is firewalled off is "private". There is no practical difference in the level of privacy. There's a difference in naming only. And of course, there is one other difference: The RFC1918 range is worse, because it can never be routed. You have no choice in the matter, it's not an option. So you have two kinds of "private networking": - Private by choice. - Private with no choice. Which do you prefer? To have choices, or to have those choices taken away from you?
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- giovannibonetti 5y ago> In order to fully migrate from EC2-Classic to VPC... Whenever I read anything about networking on AWS, I feel glad by having switched to GCP. On Google Cloud, you can put a project into production without having to fumble with networking at all (off course, the options are there if you need it). I feel more productive by only having to split my cloud resources by projects - which is a high-level concept, and a good abstraction - instead of security groups - which is a low-level implementation detail.
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- kccqzy 5y agoIndeed. In a couple places we ended up replicating the GCP project feature in AWS by creating multiple different AWS accounts (not IAM accounts, root accounts). It provided isolation between completely different apps. It was quite heavyweight but the isolation benefit was judged worthwhile.
- vishnugupta 5y agoI completely agree. At this point AWS desperately needs higher level abstractions with sane/safe defaults. They seem to be heading in that direction, example Amplify, but they still have a long way to go. I suspect AWS has now gotten so huge that there is no one PM to take a holistic look and build something to ease the pain of developers. I think a few startups are trying to fill this void.
- njonesuk 5y agoIn AWS, accounts within an AWS Organization are roughly analogous to projects within GCP. Most organisations running AWS in production will have tens or hundreds of accounts managed within their Organization. Segregating by security groups hasn't been the recommended approach for years, for this reason amongst others. The accounts and Organization model is a slightly clunkier abstraction than projects, but on the other hand the security boundaries between accounts are harder than those between projects, which has its benefits.
- ineedasername 5y agoVery interesting that mainframes were really only "dead" for about 10-15 years or so: [0] from the early/mid 90's to EC2 in 2006. Yes, the cloud if off-site, but I'm using mainframe in the sense of centralized non-desktop computing resources. [0] Not that they were ever actually dead. There's mainframes around from decades ago, and HPC continued to be required for a variety of applications, specifically research. But in terms of day-to-day computation needs, things shifted from mainframes to desktops, and centralized systems tended to be servers dedicated to a specific purpose instead of general compute needs.
- StratusBen 5y agoDisclaimer: I'm a Co-Founder of https://www.vantage.sh/ https://www.vantage.sh/ We just launched EC2 generational upgrades on Vantage that autodetects when there are chances for you to upgrade from older generation EC2 instances to get both cheaper costs and better performance. You essentially get a summary of all your older generation EC2 instances that are candidates for upgrades and what the associated savings will be. Very relevant with this news :)
- acdha 5y agoA decade without interruption is better than most enterprise IT departments manage despite considerably higher costs. I still have a couple of instance which have been upgraded a number of times over the year but aren’t quite ready to turn off yet.
- ImuMotive 5y agoJust think of all those people putting off ever migrating off EC2-Classic that now have to reboot databases that nobody knows or remembers how they were configured. The time has come. Good luck.
- Pokepokalypse 5y agoClassic Load Balancers going away. . . . there's going to be a bunch of helm charts needing to be updated.
- rswail 5y agoCLBs for EC2 Classic are going away, not CLBs in VPC.
- forgingahead 5y agoIn order to fully migrate from EC2-Classic to VPC, you need to find, examine, and migrate all of the following resources: <LIST OF AWS BILLIABLE RESOURCES> I'm not sure if this was unintentional or done as a tongue-in-check joke, but "you yourself must FIND what you're using in our services" indicates to me that they're fully aware of how hard it is to easily see what exactly you're paying for when using AWS.
- fareesh 5y agoHow does one even know if they are using EC2-Classic?
- Operyl 5y agoAccounts haven't had the ability to spin up Classic unless you were grandfathered in, iirc, and I also believe people have been getting emails about this all for quite some time. Most likely, if you're using EC2, you're not using Classic.