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Holy 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 doin

Holy 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 ago
You’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 ago
  IIRC, the S3 torrent deprecation announcement was in 2016, the recent announcement was based on API documentation cleanup
- slownews45 5y ago
  The 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 ago
    FYI, "depreciate" != "deprecate" — I also used to think it was the former once upon a time :)
    - jonplackett 5y ago
      Glad there’s someone else pedantic here so I don’t have to do it…
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
      One aspect of this mix-up that I enjoy is the fact that deprecating something causes its value to depreciate, by quite a lot!
      - notatoad 5y ago
        not only can deprecate cause depreciation, it can be a synonym for depreciate (in the financial meaning). but depreciate can't be a synonym for deprecate (in the end-of-life meaning). just one of those fun things that gets thrown in to make sure nobody ever fully understands the english language.
        carlhjerpe 5y ago
        As a Swede reading OT comments on HN I can ensure you that deprecate and depreciate are not words I would mix up unless autocorrect gets me. They look similar after all. Ordnance and ordinance I don't even know the difference between though.
    - rpeden 5y ago
      My favorite similar mixup is ordinance vs ordnance. Though I suppose they're not mutually exclusive. I'm sure that printed copies of some bylaws are hefty enough to cause serious damage if you lob them at the enemy.
      - silicon2401 5y ago
        This was hilarious when I saw local businesses put up signs requiring masks due to local "ordnance". I had to wonder what kind of masks they expected us to have
  - cperciva 5y ago
    I'm still using SimpleDB in production. I do have plans to migrate that workload, but as long as it keeps working there's really no rush...
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    We were SOL when Amazon simple payments was killed off with very short notice and then again with FlexPay.
    - slownews45 5y ago
      Good example - and goes to show how miserable it is when these folks kill stuff off.
    - simfree 5y ago
      Sounds like a good reason to integrate with Authorize.net or another vendor that provides platform agnostic APIs that let you pick your own payment vendor (at much lower cost than Amazon's payment offerings).
      - ComputerGuru 5y ago
        It was never our primary payment method, but we had higher conversion rates with it. We had Authorize.net at the time, then added PayPal PayFlow and Stripe. I actually authored a payment abstraction library that would try providers in order of priority and fall back gracefully, avoiding double charges and even abstracting over payment status, refunds, etc.
        jsjohnst 5y ago
        > I actually authored a payment abstraction library that would try providers in order of priority Were you storing PANs then?
        ComputerGuru 5y ago
        No, the retry logic was in-tandem between the client and a separate server endpoint.
- psanford 5y ago
  SimpleDB is still supported though. You can still make new SimpleDB domains. Thats part of what people love about AWS compared to Google Cloud. Google is quick to kill off services it finds no longer convenient for it to run. AWS has historically gone out of its way to keep old services running even as it releases new, better alternatives.
  - uluyol 5y ago
    Any examples?
    - psanford 5y ago
      I assume you mean on the Google Cloud side? Maybe start with https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
      - jsnell 5y ago
        The only concrete example of a sunset in the rant is support for Python 2.7 (released in 2010) in the gcloud CLI tool. Seems like a pretty bad place to start.
        psanford 5y ago
        > I know I haven’t gone into a lot of specific details about GCP’s deprecations. I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with a totally different API) to App Engine (don’t even get me started) to Cloud Endpoints to… I dunno, everything, has forced me to rewrite it all after at most 2–3 years, and they never automate it for you, and often there is no documented migration path at all. It’s just crickets.
    - temp_aws_mobile 5y ago
      I work in the AWS Mobile org. The predecessor to our premier service, Amplify, was called Mobile Hub (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-mobile-hub-build-test-and-monitor-mobile-applications/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-mobile-hub-build-test-a...). While I haven't personally worked on either service, I've heard and seen enough to know that they've taken customer obsession over keeping the lights on for any existing workloads farther than most reasonable businesses would. There is no sentiment of "force them to move to Amplify" in any conversations or design discussions, but rather "accommodate their existing workloads" as long as they exist. Update: it looks like we're executing a migration plan this year by building seemingly-full parity between Mobile Hub and Amplify (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-mobile/latest/developerguide/what-is-aws-mobile.html#migrate-to-amplify https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-mobile/latest/developerguide...) such that "if you don't migrate your project to Amplify, your app will continue to function, and all your related cloud resources will continue to be available". This seems like a great solution for existing Mobile Hub customers.
paulddraper 5y ago
To be fair, this was over a decade in the making.
jsjohnst 5y ago
EC2 Classic was essentially deprecated back in 2013, whether it was said as such at the time or not. 8+ years is an incredibly long sunset period, especially compared to AWS’s competitors.
- eli 5y ago
  I know what you mean, but I don’t think it counts as a sunset period if they haven’t announced anything.
  - notatoad 5y ago
    yeah, it's not technically a sunset period if they haven't announced the service will be ending. but they've been sending some pretty strong clues - afaik you haven't been able to create new EC2 classic instances for many years now.
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    From Jeff's blog post: > All AWS accounts created after December 4, 2013 are already VPC-only, unless EC2-Classic was enabled as a result of a support request. There were announcements made at the time, but I don't remember if they explicitly called it a deprecated product at the time (hence why I hedged my wording in GP comment).
  - ravedave5 5y ago
    The writing has been on the wall for quite a while. I got us off our last classics this year due to the october date they had been saying before.
JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
Combining "enterprise" with "vague promise of longevity" is quite the oxymoron. Google should start celling cell service if they want to continue upleveling their doublespeak abilities.
- simfree 5y ago
  Google Fi already sells cell service, it's essentially T-Mobile service but without most domestic roaming and with higher prices than Mint, T-Mobile Connect and their other MVNOs. From what I hear MMS stopped working a few months ago for iPhones on Google Fi.
  - seized 5y ago
    It's a higher price with the benefit of world wide roaming without a special plan. There are also some unlimited and multi line plans now. I've been on Fi for years and its great.
    - simfree 5y ago
      Google Fi has the same included international roaming country list as T-Mobile.
Alex3917 5y ago
> is this one of the first actual depreciation and get off service things AWS has done? The transition from Amazon Linux to Amazon Linux 2 on Elastic Beanstalk was pretty rough. The migration took a full week, and there was really only a six month window where it could be done.
- flatiron 5y ago
  EB is kinda a mixed bag. Is there much production on EB? It’s great for q&d stuff you don’t want to get into specifics but I couldn’t imagine explaining my architecture with a big “EB does what EB wants to do here” bubble
  - jitl 5y ago
    Notion (my employer) was 100% Elastic Beanstalk until about a month ago, now we’re 100% ECS. We migrated once our 1200 box cluster started stalling deploys randomly while saying everything was healthy in the API. At that many instances, the some pages in the dashboard would hang the browser. One bad day, it took like 18 hours from deploy attempt started to AWS resolving the situation by fiddling knobs on their side. Our deploys on ECS take like 15 minutes.
    - derN3rd 5y ago
      Did the migration went easy? We are currently running all our production service through EB as well, but we only had smaller issues (e.g. deployments stalling, health checks not working correctly etc). Would you recommend to invest time learning how ECS works or had your company hires that managed that?
    - slownews45 5y ago
      ECS and some ECS Fargate work great - I really like that combo. Seems pretty low overhead, and ECS anywhere I've had some luck with just playing around (you can do a local box on a 1Gig link with tons of RAM / Storage etc). My one compliant is around having fallback to on-remise providers / capacity provider etc support - doesn't seem fully fleshed out across ECS/Fargate/ECS anywhere but I may not have read docs properly yet.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ineedasername 5y ago
GCP promises not to deprecate their service until at least the next monthly billing period. /s
bagels 5y ago
They deprecate specific versions of RDS software, forcing upgrades or peril.
- kadoban 5y ago
  Same for EKS versions. I think versions of software in general they don't really necessarily keep around long, though these are the only two I can think of.
j16sdiz 5y ago
They have tools for migration and the replacement actually cover the full feature set. Unlike Google.

ComputerGuru 5y ago

You’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 ago
IIRC, the S3 torrent deprecation announcement was in 2016, the recent announcement was based on API documentation cleanup
slownews45 5y ago
The 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 ago
  FYI, "depreciate" != "deprecate" — I also used to think it was the former once upon a time :)
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Glad there’s someone else pedantic here so I don’t have to do it…
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    One aspect of this mix-up that I enjoy is the fact that deprecating something causes its value to depreciate, by quite a lot!
    - notatoad 5y ago
      not only can deprecate cause depreciation, it can be a synonym for depreciate (in the financial meaning). but depreciate can't be a synonym for deprecate (in the end-of-life meaning). just one of those fun things that gets thrown in to make sure nobody ever fully understands the english language.
      - carlhjerpe 5y ago
        As a Swede reading OT comments on HN I can ensure you that deprecate and depreciate are not words I would mix up unless autocorrect gets me. They look similar after all. Ordnance and ordinance I don't even know the difference between though.
  - rpeden 5y ago
    My favorite similar mixup is ordinance vs ordnance. Though I suppose they're not mutually exclusive. I'm sure that printed copies of some bylaws are hefty enough to cause serious damage if you lob them at the enemy.
    - silicon2401 5y ago
      This was hilarious when I saw local businesses put up signs requiring masks due to local "ordnance". I had to wonder what kind of masks they expected us to have
- cperciva 5y ago
  I'm still using SimpleDB in production. I do have plans to migrate that workload, but as long as it keeps working there's really no rush...
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  We were SOL when Amazon simple payments was killed off with very short notice and then again with FlexPay.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Good example - and goes to show how miserable it is when these folks kill stuff off.
  - simfree 5y ago
    Sounds like a good reason to integrate with Authorize.net or another vendor that provides platform agnostic APIs that let you pick your own payment vendor (at much lower cost than Amazon's payment offerings).
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      It was never our primary payment method, but we had higher conversion rates with it. We had Authorize.net at the time, then added PayPal PayFlow and Stripe. I actually authored a payment abstraction library that would try providers in order of priority and fall back gracefully, avoiding double charges and even abstracting over payment status, refunds, etc.
      - jsjohnst 5y ago
        > I actually authored a payment abstraction library that would try providers in order of priority Were you storing PANs then?
        ComputerGuru 5y ago
        No, the retry logic was in-tandem between the client and a separate server endpoint.
psanford 5y ago
SimpleDB is still supported though. You can still make new SimpleDB domains. Thats part of what people love about AWS compared to Google Cloud. Google is quick to kill off services it finds no longer convenient for it to run. AWS has historically gone out of its way to keep old services running even as it releases new, better alternatives.
- uluyol 5y ago
  Any examples?
  - psanford 5y ago
    I assume you mean on the Google Cloud side? Maybe start with https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
    - jsnell 5y ago
      The only concrete example of a sunset in the rant is support for Python 2.7 (released in 2010) in the gcloud CLI tool. Seems like a pretty bad place to start.
      - psanford 5y ago
        > I know I haven’t gone into a lot of specific details about GCP’s deprecations. I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with a totally different API) to App Engine (don’t even get me started) to Cloud Endpoints to… I dunno, everything, has forced me to rewrite it all after at most 2–3 years, and they never automate it for you, and often there is no documented migration path at all. It’s just crickets.
  - temp_aws_mobile 5y ago
    I work in the AWS Mobile org. The predecessor to our premier service, Amplify, was called Mobile Hub (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-mobile-hub-build-test-and-monitor-mobile-applications/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-mobile-hub-build-test-a...). While I haven't personally worked on either service, I've heard and seen enough to know that they've taken customer obsession over keeping the lights on for any existing workloads farther than most reasonable businesses would. There is no sentiment of "force them to move to Amplify" in any conversations or design discussions, but rather "accommodate their existing workloads" as long as they exist. Update: it looks like we're executing a migration plan this year by building seemingly-full parity between Mobile Hub and Amplify (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-mobile/latest/developerguide/what-is-aws-mobile.html#migrate-to-amplify https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-mobile/latest/developerguide...) such that "if you don't migrate your project to Amplify, your app will continue to function, and all your related cloud resources will continue to be available". This seems like a great solution for existing Mobile Hub customers.

paulddraper 5y ago

To be fair, this was over a decade in the making.

jsjohnst 5y ago

EC2 Classic was essentially deprecated back in 2013, whether it was said as such at the time or not. 8+ years is an incredibly long sunset period, especially compared to AWS’s competitors.

eli 5y ago
I know what you mean, but I don’t think it counts as a sunset period if they haven’t announced anything.
- notatoad 5y ago
  yeah, it's not technically a sunset period if they haven't announced the service will be ending. but they've been sending some pretty strong clues - afaik you haven't been able to create new EC2 classic instances for many years now.
- jsjohnst 5y ago
  From Jeff's blog post: > All AWS accounts created after December 4, 2013 are already VPC-only, unless EC2-Classic was enabled as a result of a support request. There were announcements made at the time, but I don't remember if they explicitly called it a deprecated product at the time (hence why I hedged my wording in GP comment).
- ravedave5 5y ago
  The writing has been on the wall for quite a while. I got us off our last classics this year due to the october date they had been saying before.

JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago

Combining "enterprise" with "vague promise of longevity" is quite the oxymoron. Google should start celling cell service if they want to continue upleveling their doublespeak abilities.

simfree 5y ago
Google Fi already sells cell service, it's essentially T-Mobile service but without most domestic roaming and with higher prices than Mint, T-Mobile Connect and their other MVNOs. From what I hear MMS stopped working a few months ago for iPhones on Google Fi.
- seized 5y ago
  It's a higher price with the benefit of world wide roaming without a special plan. There are also some unlimited and multi line plans now. I've been on Fi for years and its great.
  - simfree 5y ago
    Google Fi has the same included international roaming country list as T-Mobile.

Alex3917 5y ago

> is this one of the first actual depreciation and get off service things AWS has done? The transition from Amazon Linux to Amazon Linux 2 on Elastic Beanstalk was pretty rough. The migration took a full week, and there was really only a six month window where it could be done.

flatiron 5y ago
EB is kinda a mixed bag. Is there much production on EB? It’s great for q&d stuff you don’t want to get into specifics but I couldn’t imagine explaining my architecture with a big “EB does what EB wants to do here” bubble
- jitl 5y ago
  Notion (my employer) was 100% Elastic Beanstalk until about a month ago, now we’re 100% ECS. We migrated once our 1200 box cluster started stalling deploys randomly while saying everything was healthy in the API. At that many instances, the some pages in the dashboard would hang the browser. One bad day, it took like 18 hours from deploy attempt started to AWS resolving the situation by fiddling knobs on their side. Our deploys on ECS take like 15 minutes.
  - derN3rd 5y ago
    Did the migration went easy? We are currently running all our production service through EB as well, but we only had smaller issues (e.g. deployments stalling, health checks not working correctly etc). Would you recommend to invest time learning how ECS works or had your company hires that managed that?
  - slownews45 5y ago
    ECS and some ECS Fargate work great - I really like that combo. Seems pretty low overhead, and ECS anywhere I've had some luck with just playing around (you can do a local box on a 1Gig link with tons of RAM / Storage etc). My one compliant is around having fallback to on-remise providers / capacity provider etc support - doesn't seem fully fleshed out across ECS/Fargate/ECS anywhere but I may not have read docs properly yet.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ineedasername 5y ago

GCP promises not to deprecate their service until at least the next monthly billing period. /s

bagels 5y ago

They deprecate specific versions of RDS software, forcing upgrades or peril.

kadoban 5y ago
Same for EKS versions. I think versions of software in general they don't really necessarily keep around long, though these are the only two I can think of.

j16sdiz 5y ago

They have tools for migration and the replacement actually cover the full feature set. Unlike Google.