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It's a valid concern. AWS has been around for many years now with numerous services. Has there been a single offering which they retired or stopped supporting?

It's a valid concern. AWS has been around for many years now with numerous services. Has there been a single offering which they retired or stopped supporting? I'm not aware of one. Amazon doesn't just create services, throws them over the wall and see if they stick. Rather, they almost always RESPOND to customer requests. Dr. Werner Vogels, AWS's CTO makes a point about that approach at about any keynote he gives. Similarly, they try to also avoid feature creep by only providing features which customers really ask for.

bradly 12y ago
SimpleDB is the closest I believe. It's still around if you are using it, but it isn't in the web console anymore.
- deleted 12y ago
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riffraff 12y ago
I am unaware of AWS modules discontinued by amazon, but it is also true that the oldest services are the most popular (S3, EC2) while some of the most recent ones have a (apparently?) smaller user base (SWF, Kinesis, AppStream). I think I remember amazon people saying they are actually dogfooding this stuff so it should stay available for a long time anyway, rather than being a random Google Reader.
- Twirrim 12y ago
  There is a strong culture of dog-fooding in Amazon. The advantages to it are quite straight forward :) If you've got a whole bunch of DBA experts already hired, why would you hire additional people to do DBA work for every team, when they could just use RDS? Along with that is the huge added benefit of a direct feedback loop, with consumers and producers able to directly meet and deal with feature requests, problems etc. etc. Retiring any of the services that have been launched would cause not inconsiderable pain to other teams :)
- jldugger 12y ago
  AWS's practice of charging people seems to make it pretty easy to justify not pulling a Google on users.
- spartango 12y ago
  AWS definitely dogfoods, to the point where people have to be careful internally to not create circular dependencies (this nearly happened to me once). I think there's a notion of persistence in AWS' leadership that propagates through the teams. AWS is willing to fight through the early painful years for products to see them arrive at the stage that EC2/S3 have attained.

bradly 12y ago

SimpleDB is the closest I believe. It's still around if you are using it, but it isn't in the web console anymore.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

riffraff 12y ago

I am unaware of AWS modules discontinued by amazon, but it is also true that the oldest services are the most popular (S3, EC2) while some of the most recent ones have a (apparently?) smaller user base (SWF, Kinesis, AppStream). I think I remember amazon people saying they are actually dogfooding this stuff so it should stay available for a long time anyway, rather than being a random Google Reader.

Twirrim 12y ago
There is a strong culture of dog-fooding in Amazon. The advantages to it are quite straight forward :) If you've got a whole bunch of DBA experts already hired, why would you hire additional people to do DBA work for every team, when they could just use RDS? Along with that is the huge added benefit of a direct feedback loop, with consumers and producers able to directly meet and deal with feature requests, problems etc. etc. Retiring any of the services that have been launched would cause not inconsiderable pain to other teams :)
jldugger 12y ago
AWS's practice of charging people seems to make it pretty easy to justify not pulling a Google on users.
spartango 12y ago
AWS definitely dogfoods, to the point where people have to be careful internally to not create circular dependencies (this nearly happened to me once). I think there's a notion of persistence in AWS' leadership that propagates through the teams. AWS is willing to fight through the early painful years for products to see them arrive at the stage that EC2/S3 have attained.