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As 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 20
by juliansimioni 5y ago
As 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.