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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know, AWS has never shut down a service. They've stopped offering some services in new accounts, but if you already had it you still do (like SimpleDB).

Microsoft and Oracle are both well known for extremely long term support and creating easy migration paths.

I would only ever use GCP as an offsite backup or use some of their AI tools as part of toolchain that either operates on a copy of the data or lands its output on another cloud.

In other words I would always make sure to design in a way where I could exit Google in 30 days or less.

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They shut down ec2 classic, PV instances too. Not recent, but it’s something. Nothing compared to the thousands of products google killed that tons of people used. I personally use two Google products - gmail and maps. That’s it. I don’t trust them to do ANYTHING else.

> They shut down ec2 classic, PV instances too

That's a fair callout. But also they provided a one year migration timeline, let you keep using it if you already were, and gave you tools to easily migrate what you had left.

So I'd say if anything they increased trust by showing how to do it right.

And arguably that's a feature, not a product.

PV instances still work on EC2 today.

They are only available on older regions however.

Paravirt AMIs do and will keep working for a very long time to come.

As long as they can mine your gmail and maps to sell better ads or improve their other services they will survive.

Using BitTorrent on S3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549

EC2 Classic networking support

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-her...

I would consider those both features, not products. And for both they gave a long lead time and an easy off-ramp.

It is very much a product that if it were discontinued without an exit plan and working with large customers there would have been a world of hurt, a lot of legacy customers didn’t move off until they were forced into it.

Disclaimer: I work at AWS ProServe.

I assume you're talking about EC2 classic? If so, I'm aware, I was one of those legacy customers who didn't move until forced. :)

But the point is, they hired people like you just to help people like me move to the newer better product that replaced all the functionality and then some. We didn't have to suddenly figure out a way to replace core functionality.

Curious which services under GCP have been shut down? I get that Google killed Reader and that GCP users used Google Domains, but for the time-being GCP has felt safe.

Cloud IoT comes to mind, and the linked thread claims cloud domains is on the chopping block. However, most Google cloud services have a Ship of Theseus thing going on, where they'll deprecate most features of a particular service without deprecating the service name as a whole. Nothing that was written stayed working without constant maintenance, no matter how trivial or important the features (e.g. spending limits in AppEngine).

Google Domains, Stadia, Firestore, Chatbase, IOT Core, Zync render, Cloud print, Jump, Cloud Messaging, Prediction API, Cloud Connect, and the video rendering service. But more importantly, Google has a reputation for shutting things down in general:

https://killedbygoogle.com

From what I've heard, the biggest selling point of GCP is its simplicity and easier development experience. Other than that, it's mostly inferior to AWS or even MS Azure.

AWS is designed to be very flexible and configurable (example: look at IAM). The tradeof is the complexity and amount of work required to set up even the most frequently used services (such as ECS Fargate or Lambda).

That being said, if somebody is looking for a simple, developer-first experience, and wants to use AWS (and have all of its power/flexibility), have a look at https://stacktape.com (I'm a founder).

OpsWorks is going to stop working next year.

I didn't see anything about that. But I assume if it is they will provide an off-ramp to Cloudformation or another similar tool.

elastic inference comes to mind.

They still have that. You just can’t sign up for new workloads on it, but you wouldn’t want to because there are cheaper and better options now.

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