Hacker News Reader

Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

> I’m not actively developing on AWS, so I don’t have as much of a sense for how often they sunset APIs that they have previously dangled alluringly before unwitting developers.

SimpleDB still works, it's not even deprecated or grandfathered to not accept new users. There is really nothing else you need to know about how AWS treats deprecation than that single example.

Deprecation is practically unheard of in AWS. If it does happen you can be damn sure it takes years to actually remove obsolete functionality and there is a fairly easy migration path to something of equivalent functionality.

View on HN

Another example: There was a change to how objects within S3 could be addressed by http(s): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...

Initially the (justified) change gave you ~18 months to implement necessary changes. Seems feedback was negative regardless, so they modified it in a way so current usage remains unaffected.

They didn't have a choice, their internal teams weren't ready for S3 SigV4. For example, EMR was not ready for SigV4. That means ton of customers can't use EMR.

One more example: on Dec 2019, AWS Cloudfront finally decided to drop support for Flash [1]. Yes, Flash. And anyone still using Flash still has until Dec 31, 2020 to migrate.

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=7356

EC2 vs EC2-classic. I got badly burned (mentally) because I had to learn about creating EC2 instances using the company AWS account created before 2014, but then needed to create instances on a client account created in 2014.

Also: classic vs application load balancers - especially the health checks. That one drove me nuts for weeks!

AWS never seems to "deprecate" anything, but they do enjoy adding services which are very similar to other services but guaranteed to trip people (ie: me) up when it comes to the buried-in-the-documentation details.

the main thing here though is the older things you’re moving away from in those cases are still around. AWS didn’t remove classic load balancers and force you onto application load balancers.

Agreed. But they did deprecate EC2-Classic.

"The EC2-Classic platform was introduced in the original release of Amazon EC2. If you created your AWS account after 2013-12-04, it does not support EC2-Classic."

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-clas...

Yeah but this is the customer-friendly way to deprecate - let existing users keep using the old method indefinitely, new users have to use the new way.

> after 2013-12-04

That was 4 years after VPC was launched. So yes, while they do deprecate stuff on the rarest of occasions, they still give you much, much more time than GCP ever did.

Also, EC2-Classic is still available if you reach out to your TAM with a really good reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com