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Comment by davesmylie | Hacker News Reader

I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers.

I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm

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It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.

If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964

My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!

That's crazy. That would never work unless these are just a VLAN configured on existing switches. Even VXLAN wouldn't be able to do that 5 years ago.

AWS developed their own custom overlay networking system. It embeds tenant IDs into the packets for isolation

Running out of IP addresses within that VPC is a real difficulty for services still using it.

I was also surprised by this, does that mean it used to be impossible to not have a publicly routable IP in AWS?

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