For the first time in its history, AWS has discontinued several managed services within a matter of days. Among the affected services are the source control AWS CodeCommit, the cloud-based IDE AWS Cloud9, and the time-series forecasting service Amazon Forecast. The wave of deprecations has led to concerns within the community due to the lack of clear communication.
After deprecating the ledger database Amazon QLDB, as separately reported on InfoQ, AWS began posting articles to document how to replace CodeCommit with other Git providers, CloudSearch with OpenSearch, and Cloud9 with AWS IDE Toolkits. While the technical articles provided useful information, they did not initially clarify whether the existing services had been discontinued, leaving the community in a state of uncertainty.
None of the retirements — S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, and CodeCommit — appeared on the announcement page and feeds, a practice that other providers usually follow. While existing customers might have received emails clarifying the status of the affected services, others were left wondering if the services were still supported or if AWS was changing its philosophy. To clarify the status of the affected services—a small percentage of the over 200 available—Jeff Barr, vice president and chief evangelist at AWS, confirmed:
After giving it a lot of thought, we made the decision to discontinue new access to a small number of services, including AWS CodeCommit. While we are no longer onboarding new customers to these services, there are no plans to change the features or experience you get today, including keeping them secure and reliable. We also support migrations to other AWS or third-party solutions better aligned with your evolving needs. Keep the feedback coming. We’re always listening.
Matthew Juliana, senior manager at Rackspace Technology, highlights how Barr’s message significantly differs from the "retiring services isn't something we do at AWS" statement that Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, wrote just over a year ago. SimpleDB, a service superseded by DynamoDB over a decade ago, has often been used as an example of AWS not killing services like other providers do. In the article "The end of the Everything Cloud", Forrest Brazeal comments:
This is not an indication that AWS is turning into GCP, who has inherited from broader Google a deserved reputation for pulling the rug out from under users by killing services with wide adoption (...) These services have been in maintenance-only mode for some time.
Andrew Brown, CEO of ExamPro, writes:
Whether this is a marketing blunder or not to me the idea of AWS cleaning up their catalog and killing off zombie AWS Services and Products is a good idea.
After suggesting that AWS should provide a deprecation page, Scott Piper, cloud security consultant, now maintains a list on GitHub of the services that have been deprecated. Piper writes:
I'd also like to hear the strategy moving forward around this in terms of whether this is a one-time event, or if we should expect more batches of deprecations (...) how should one be evaluating services now that a change in strategy has happened at AWS?
Since the original posts, various deprecation notes have been added to the articles documenting the migrations from the affected services, clarifying the status of each one.
