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Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
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- wawwow 3y agoIt's likely a move to reorient their price points. Apparently, according to the economist, Amazon Aws is it's sole bread earner.
- keltex 3y agoThis is something Google Cloud should learn from. It doesn't matter if product XX still makes money or fits in your business model. There are people who rely on it. And they'll remember if the vendor kept it running trouble free for years. They'll also remember if it was arbitrarily shut down or the price was suddenly increased by 4x and they had to spend many man hours migrating to another option. (Google maps api?) Then in the future when that same person is responsibly for choosing a vendor for a new project, they'll remember.
- mongol 3y agoThat's a good point. But I am curious how special this Classic offering was, compared to what came after. Would migration have been hard?
- snewman 3y agoIt's not so much that EC2 Classic offered any features that were difficult to live without. It's just that migraine away from it means migrating, period. You need to move all of your systems, including any data stored on those systems (in instance store or EBS), to effectively a new data center. Migrating a live production environment can be a pain and/or cause downtime.
- knodi123 3y ago> It's just that migraine away from it means migrating, period. Freudian slip?
- brianshaler 3y agoIt's also worth remembering that infrastructure stuck on EC2 Classic would have been built so long ago it may predate modern cloud tooling and even modern best practices around reproducibility and CI/CD. (EC2 user since 2010)
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThis. Unless a written guarantee could be offered by the cloud provider that migration will be absolutely trouble free, why wouldn't customers just stick to what they know works? And if they're not willing to provide a written guarantee, then that says a lot.
- snewman 3y agoIn this scenario, it's nothing to do with the cloud provider. Migrating a live production system is inherently difficult. You can make a reasonable analogy to moving houses – say, with two kids who are in school, and while you and your spouse are both working. No matter what guarantees you're given regarding the condition of the new house, simply moving all of your stuff (while you are using it) is a big hassle.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIn this example, it wouldn't be the guarantees for the new house, which presumably would have been examined and accepted well beforehand, it would be guarantees for the moving process itself.
- acdha 3y agoExactly - and with fewer managed services back then they’d also be more likely to have hand-rolled servers doing things which you’d now try to hand off to a managed service. I remember entire servers running small tasks which you’d now have, say, CloudFront or an ALB invoking Lambdas or at least sending it to a container.
- flir 3y agoGoogle Reader. Never forget.
- sneak 3y agoI miss Google Search being good and useful and not covered in intrusive ads much more than I miss something easily replaced with local software or Feedly. Almost everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care. Google's problem is not that they cancel stuff, it's the everpresent need to grow revenue and embed annoying ads into more and more of everyone's daily lives. I'd love for them to cancel Gmail with a very short notice period. The endgame for Google is every Google user loaded full of energy drinks watching ads continuously for 20 hours a day. Every lifestyle that's less profitable than that is something Google will eventually try to engineer away.
- Kuinox 3y agoI started to use Kagi instead of google search. Since, it's difficult to get back on google, the results are so much worse.
- xnx 3y agoWhat's an example search that's better on Kagi?
- recursive 3y ago"Radiator". I just picked a word at random. All the other ones are better too.
- freeAgent 3y agoFunny enough, I just tried it and I agree. I have pinned Wikipedia in Kagi, so that came out on top rather than a link to Autozone at Google. Google's "Places" results were also (significantly) farther away yet no more relevant than Kagi's. So...yes. Radiator.
- resolutebat 3y agoGoogle Cloud officially deprecated its EC2 Classic equivalent, legacy networks, years ago but they're still running just fine: https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/legacy https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/legacy
- hotstickyballs 3y agoSounds to me like a rug pull is imminent
- rgoulter 3y agohttps://goomics.net/50/ https://goomics.net/50/
- panarky 3y agoI'm experiencing a bizarre sense of unreality reading comments on a story about Amazon killing EC2-Classic, where the first line is "Retiring services isn’t something we do", while having just read yet another email from Amazon warning me about all my files stored in the defunct Amazon Drive, and somehow 90% of the discussion is about a completely different company discontinuing products.
- twothamendment 3y agoWe had some classic ec-2. They gave plenty of warning and migration was easy. I think Google is being brought up so much because that isn't the typical Google experience when they kill things off. I get your point, if AI were training on this content it might conclude that Google killed off its ec-2 product.
- wmf 3y agoAWS is pretty separate from consumer Amazon.
- master_crab 3y agoYup was going to say. AWS treats its customers a bit differently than retail Amazon. The latter cuts services faster than Google.
- weinzierl 3y agoI agree with everything you wrote, except for the very last sentence. This is just wishful thinking. First of all "when the same person is responsible" is a very big if, and then no two buying decisions are the same and even if the person with decision-making power remembers it'll be just one point on a long list.
- bilalq 3y agoGoogle clearly doesn't care about their reputation. Their shutdown of Pixel Pass before users got a chance to upgrade was just ridiculous[1]. It's hard to quantify the impact that this poor reputation has on their business. Their revenue is still growing, but it's definitely not where it could be. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/23851107/google-graveyard-pixel-pass-subscription-phone-upgrades https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/23851107/google-graveyard...
- rakkhi 3y agoSoftware engineering at Google even had a law for their https://medium.com/se-101-software-engineering/what-is-the-hyrums-law-and-why-should-software-engineers-care-9bd98fbe74da https://medium.com/se-101-software-engineering/what-is-the-h...
- davedx 3y agoI still remember when I worked at Serif and we needed web hosting for our new social media website that would be integrated into our scrapbooking desktop software. There were a lot of shiny new technologies around at the time (as there always are). One of them was Microsoft Silverlight, and we implemented its "Deep Zoom" into the website so our users could easily zoom around in the scrapbooks that got published and enjoy the details. Another was AWS. I think EC2 had just launched, and we happened to be re-evaluating where we hosted our web properties, because we thought the social media website would get a bit more traffic than our older "web components" offering. It was pretty exciting that we could just click a button and spin up an instance in the US, or in Ireland, or Amsterdam. And if the instance died, just click a button again to spin up another one. As it is today, so it was then: the simple UI hid quite some complexity. There were the different kinds of storage to learn about, and which ones were persistent, and which weren't. If I remember rightly those early EC2 instances weren't as reliable as they seem to be today either, we actually lost one or two completely and had to rebuild them, so we snapshotted a lot. There was no infrastructure as code or DevOps, but we did implement our own highly available cluster. One of the engineers I worked with actually wrote it from scratch, in C++ (we were primarily a C++ company). It would monitor the databases in the different EC2 instances, and ensure the database cluster stayed alive. We didn't really know what we were doing, what was smart, there weren't any cloud architects around back then. But the technology worked really well. Once we got past the initial hiccups, we built a pretty active internet community. The website itself was built in PHP with MySQL, and used XSLT to transform XML data (that in turn was built from relational data from SQL) to generate the HTML. There wasn't a great deal of JavaScript, just some jQuery (another technology I just randomly stumbled on while working on this project that also changed quite a few things). Progressive enhancement, and server-side rendering. I'm trying to remember how we deployed it. I think we used FileZilla, and then the C++ cluster software would clone the uploaded files to the other EC2 instances in the other AZ's. I can't remember how much peak traffic we had, but in retrospect, we probably didn't need a server in 3 different AZ's. But damn, it was fun to work on, and it gave me my first introduction to AWS. Good times.
- pirate787 3y agoI remember those days, there was no database layer at AWS so we used instances with Elastic Block store for durability.
- londons_explore 3y agoSo if I'm understanding correctly, all the classic instances were migrated to more modern types with no intervention from the account holder? Did they suffer a reboot during that migration, or was it done via some live-migration process (it's hard to live-migrate off a virtualization platform that was never designed with that in mind!). What about the original network setup? Is that still emulated, or might some customer applications have broken?
- motoboi 3y agoThe had to be restarted, but not only that, has to have their networks reconfigured. But they gave people YEARS to do that, and tracked down every user to help them if necessary.
- londons_explore 3y ago> has to have their networks reconfigured. I don't see why every user couldn't be auto-created a virtual network with the same 10.x.x.x IP addresses as their original machine had - and therefore there is no need to do any reconfiguration on the users side.
- motoboi 3y agoBecause people could have that same network on-promises on the other side of the VPN (I have).
- londons_explore 3y agoBut that isn't a new problem if the same user already uses that address - you're just leaving them with the same issue they already had.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoBecause there's more than just the local IP address to worry about. Remember, all of EC2 Classic was in a single /8 of private IPs. You could communicate with EC2 instances in another account via their private IP address. If you have two instances in different accounts that need to communicate, upgrading from EC2 Classic to VPC couldn't be done automatically.
- loopdoend 3y agoWas wondering when they'd finally shut that box down, I was keeping it on just to troll them.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> Ten years ago, during my 2013 keynote at re:Invent, I told you that we wanted to “support today’s workloads as well as tomorrow’s,” and our commitment to Classic is the best evidence of that. It’s not lost on me, the amount of work that goes into an effort like this — but it is exactly this type of work that builds trust, and I’m proud of the way it has been handled. To me, this embodies what it means to be customer obsessed. The EC2 team kept Classic running (and running well) until every instance was shut down or migrated. This is why businesses trust AWS.
- htrp 3y ago> So, I wouldn’t blame you if you were wondering what makes an EC2 instance “Classic”. Put simply, it’s the network architecture. When we launched EC2 in 2006, it was one giant network of 10.2.0.0/8. And they kept this running for a decade after people agreed there were much better options with an announced 2 year sunset period.
- gnfargbl 3y ago> one giant network of 10.2.0.0/8 Huh? Do they mean 10.0.0.0/8, or 10.2.0.0/16 (/15 would also work), or is this a new CIDR notation? Something specific to AWS, maybe?
- crabbone 3y agoTechnically, it doesn't matter what number you stick after the first stop in a /8 network. Might as well write it as 10.X.X.X/8, it's all the same. I'm not sure where I've seen this done, but >90% certain some of the ip commands output this kind of CIDRs by simply concatenating the IP of the node you are querying and the size of the network.
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- gilbetron 3y agoYou encounter that all the time in the networking world - formally the bits outside of the prefix length should be 0, but informally you'll often see set bits. Often it is a way to say "the subnet that includes this ip address". So 192.254.33.12/16 or something. Could just be a typo, too. Regardless, it doesn't really matter what is in the bits outside of the prefix length, because they get zeroed out when used.
- gnfargbl 3y agoYeah, but that makes sense -- it's a shorthand for "the IP address 192.254.33.12 which is in the /16 subnet".
- _m8fo 3y agoThis is a level of support all software companies should aspire to. It's also what the enterprise likes to see and will give you money for.
- CSMastermind 3y agoI continue to choose AWS for the companies I work at not because their offerings are better, but because their support is so far superior.
- nerdjon 3y agoI had an interview somewhere that was using Google Cloud. My responsibility would be to own all of that (the CTO was who was interviewing me) but I took the interview since I wanted to understand why and wether or not I actually had the power to change that (given I would own it). I didn't, and didn't take the job and Google Cloud was a major reason for it. I did not want my job at the risk of Google's decisions. I just don't trust them. AWS may not be perfect but I don't worry as much that a decision on their part is going to really screw me over.
- whoknowswhat11 3y agoEc2 classic was dirt simple. You basically were on a big public lan it felt like. If I remember right there were some issues with folks running scans / abuse originating inside AWS that felt like got a touch slow of a response - then at some point it all cleared up? I remember hardening internal systems as if the they were public which was a good practice even as vpc arrived. They might have gotten a default public ip as well? I used google app engine which was orphaned (at least version I tried) so that was a clear contrast w AWS.
- whoknowswhat11 3y agoNote my one complaint was that it would have been nice to wrap the resource finder script into the gui / web interface
- ydant 3y ago[parent comment was edited, it originally mentioned SimpleDB] Speaking of SimpleDB, we still use it. It's amusing how it's basically swept under a rug at AWS. It's never mentioned, barely documented, but continues to work. It's a pretty good product for what it is - a very simple key/value store where you don't need/want to manage provisioned throughput, costs, keys, etc. The way they handle SimpleDB makes me respect AWS and feel more comfortable on some other services we also rely on that seem close to abandoned (like ElasticBeanstalk). However, as a counter-point, they are killing OpsWorks with what feels like a fairly short notice, so I'm also a bit cautious about how long they'll maintain services.
- aitchnyu 3y agoThey added Python 3.11 last month. Why do you call it close to abandoned?
- ydant 3y agoRe: ElasticBeanstalk - it's just a feeling, and hopefully not correct - it just doesn't feel like it's one of their primary focuses, and seems suspiciously stable overall. There's nothing I particular want them to add, though, so maybe it's "perfect". I love it, though - it's been a great boon for our small team - allowing for a painless hands-off deployment strategy that's worked great (largely unchanged) for almost a decade.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI remember being hired for a short consulting gig, and my customer asked that the back end be hosted on an EC2 classic instance, I think while it was still in beta. The project was a simple App running on what I think was some sort of Google TV prototype box (it was a long time ago and it was a one or two day project so I really don’t remember the details). I used to love AWS but after I worked a while at Google in 2013, I switched all my personal projects to GCP for nostalgia (but for work, just used whatever platform customers wanted).
- skizm 3y agoI haven't spun up anything in the cloud in a while. I used to dabble in both AWS and Digital Ocean. Usually went with DO because it seemed simpler and my projects were super small (and they had a lot of relevant guides to spinning up X, Y, and Z service on their systems). What is the difference between EC2-classic and whatever is available today? Are you still able to just get a linux box with a public IP address?
- AaronM 3y agoYou have to create at minimum a vpc, internet gateway and at least one subnet/route table pointing to the igw
- skizm 3y agoOh man, I don't know any of these concepts (rather I've heard of all of them, but don't know how they apply in practice). I'm probably not the target customer for AWS any more haha. Been so long since I did anything web related. Time to find some networking for dummies youtube channels I guess.
- manojlds 3y agoNah, it's just EC2 you are not a target of. Checkout AWS Lightsail
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago> You have to create at minimum a vpc A default VPC is created automatically. For simple projects, that's good enough. > internet gateway and at least one subnet/route table pointing to the igw Only if you have a private subnet.
- michelledepeil 3y agoYes, but the reality is that EC2 is optimized for a target audience who wants to customize the deployment beyond a linux box with a public IP. But iirc following the "Launch Instance" wizard and choosing defaults for everything, as well as a (default) public subnet gives the exact thing you're asking for.
- 38 3y agoLightSail is decent: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail
- Bluecobra 3y agoMinor nitpick, 10.2.0.0/8 is not a valid subnet mask. The largest subnet you can make starting with 10.2.0.0 is 10.2.0.0/15. As far as I can tell everything was done in 10.0.0.0/8 but Amazon has took down EC2-Classic documentation. https://web.archive.org/web/20150302235811/https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/vpc-classiclink.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150302235811/https://docs.aws....
- computerfriend 3y agoI believe it is valid, the /8 masks it so the 2 might as well be a 0.
- anonymoushn 3y agoI was overbilled for this service in 2011 and Amazon insists to this day that they do not have records about this even if I forward them the emails :)
- supazek 3y agoI setup an AWS account in college before I had ever worked and dealt with enterprise security. Didn’t use the account for anything. No 2FA and a weak password and all of a sudden I have a $15,000 bill from a crypto mining script. Worked with Amazon, got everything cleaned up, turned on 2FA and was only charged $100. Pretty generous considering it was entirely my fault
- dredmorbius 3y agoSomeone else's fraud isn't your fault. Amazon can damned well run password strength / compromise tests and validations.
- rob74 3y ago> The complexities of managing infrastructure, buying new hardware, upgrading software, replacing failed disks — had been abstracted away ...and replaced by the complexities of AWS. I mean, even in the pre-AWS days, it's not like you had to buy the hardware or replace the failed disks yourself, web hosters did that for you.
- ignoramous 3y ago> I mean, even in the pre-AWS days, it's not like you had to buy the hardware or replace the failed disks yourself, web hosters did that for you. Given no single web hoster has grown to the size of AWS / Azure, it is safe to assume just which complexities the industry is willing to tolerate. I mean, Oracle still rakes in billions, despite everything.
- ceejayoz 3y agoSure, but it often required a) you to detect and diagnose it on your own and b) a couple hours to a couple of weeks for them to agree and swap it out. Versus the ability to click a few buttons and have a brand new server on separate hardware.
- dangus 3y agoAWS doesn’t have to be complex if those aren’t your requirements, you can use something like Lightsail. If all you need is a VPS, get a VPS. (Though if that’s what you need, I personally like Hetzner more). But AWS needs to be complex to handle the needs of huge organizations. I will also point out that the AWS console EC2 launching interface has come such a long way. So much to the complexity is handled for you.
- Aurornis 3y ago> it's not like you had to buy the hardware or replace the failed disks yourself, web hosters did that for you. That’s an oversimplification. Yes, you didn’t go into the data center and replace the disk yourself, but it was a very different process than what you get with AWS. There are still plenty of web hosts that operate the old fashioned way if people want to use them. There is a reason people prefer services like AWS though.
- brianshaler 3y agoOff topic, but I'm confused about the IPv4 notation in this quote: > When we launched EC2 in 2006, it was one giant network of 10.2.0.0/8. In my understanding, /8 means the first octet would be fixed (10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255) and I'm having trouble understanding the significance of the 2 here. If the 2 is significant, wouldn't you write it as /16? Given the source and my confidence on this notation, I feel like there must be some meaning an expert can glean from this. If so, I'm curious to learn. If it's just a typo, then that's fine and I apologize if this is nit-picky.
- Bluecobra 3y agoI think it must be a typo. because 10.2.0.0/8 is not a valid subnet mask. The largest subnet you can make starting with 10.2.0.0 is 10.2.0.0/15.
- jedberg 3y agoIt's still a valid subnet notation, the 2 just doesn't mean anything. When you take the logical AND of the IP and the expanded mask, you'll just end up with 10.0.0.0 as the network address and 10.255.255.255 as the broadcast address.
- smileybarry 3y agoI’m guessing it’s a typo, but maybe it was a 10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255 subnet with EC2-Classic machines allocating purely from 10.2.0.0-10.2.255.255, and 10.x.0.0-10.x.255.255 was allocated for other services?
- thargor90 3y agoYou are right. The /8 is 10.0.0.0/8. I guess it's not a typo, but a weird way to write 10.0.0.0/8 excluding 10.1.0.0/16 .
- mlyle 3y agoIt doesn't exclude 10.1.0.0/16, or any of the rest of 10/8.
- SillyUsername 3y agoNow all they need to do is actually allow a fixed budget instead of possible runaway credit card charges. Microsoft do it, and IIRC Google, so why not Amazon? I've been waiting for this for about 20 years too :D
- ZoomerCretin 3y agoBecause it would make them less money and their customers aren't so price sensitive.
- bdcravens 3y agoIt would kill the ecosystem of highly paid "cloud cost optimization" consultants who do little more than flip a few switches in the AWS console.
- poxrud 3y agoI know it’s not the same but you can setup billing alarms and budget alerts.
- benterix 3y ago> If you had launched an instance in 2006, an m1.small, you would have gotten a virtual CPU the equivalent of a 1.7 GHz Xeon processor with 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of local disk, and 250 Mb/second of network bandwidth. And it would have cost just $0.10 per clocked hour. > It’s quite incredible where cloud computing has gone since then, with a P3dn.24xlarge providing 100 Gbps of network throughput, 96 vCPUs, 8 NVIDIA v100 Tensor Core GPUs, 32 GiB of memory, and 1.8 TB of local SSD storage, not to mention an EFA to accelerate ML workloads. They decided to omit the price but I think it's relatively good - around 31 USD per hour. Just remember to turn it off after you're done otherwise it will cost you over 7 grand.
- couchand 3y agoClassic sales maneuver, give numbers but make your numbers as incomparable as possible.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoI really wish pricing pages included both per-hour and per-month (or per-30-days) pricing.
- stilwelldotdev 3y ago"Retiring services isn’t something we do at AWS. It’s quite rare." I read this while I was taking a break from working on an epic to migrate our stuff off of OpsWorks before it gets shut down in May.
- mh- 3y agoand I, while dealing with the fallout of migrating something from AWS Data Pipeline (it entered "Maintenance Mode" and they removed console access earlier this year.)
- hughesjj 3y agoData pipelines was also a perennial shit show behind the scenes. Turns out integration is a lot of complexity even if the service is "simple" in concept and doesn't need to be so real time. I feel like data pipelines and swf have been replaced by step functions+event bus+lambdas/fargate. We've furthered abstractions over time, and that's a good thing. Edit that said no idea how they scale in comparison
- adrianmsmith 3y agoThat was jarring for me, I wasn't quite sure what the article wanted to say at first. Title "we're doing X", body "we don't do X here".
- res0nat0r 3y agoChef has been dying for a long time and was beaten to death when the company was bought by some VC and everyone was fired a couple of years ago. I can understand why the service is going away as Chef and Puppet are not exactly gaining marketshare. AWS rarely retires services and when they do they pretty much give months/year(s) worth of notice before forcing you to migrate which is very nice.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y agoCompare this to Azure and you'll understand.
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- saurik 3y agoEC2-Classic was magical. It felt like we were finally living in the future: a world where software was in charge of networking, and all of the legacy cruft that came from having to build networks out of cable could be forgotten. Rather than care about legacy IP "subnets", the cloud cared about "security groups", which were missing only a couple features (such as "hierarchy") to entirely replace the role of a subnet in traditional networking. Having spent a lot of time working with EC2-Classic, it made network engineering fun and easy. The new "VPC" mechanism is demoralizing in its complexity, and doesn't seem to allow anything you couldn't express using security groups. I've written about this before--in more detail or with more rhetoric, depending on my mood--but the big feeling I get from the transition from EC2-Classic was the frustration that comes when other people make something worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36829190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36829190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33569889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33569889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27990847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27990847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25988915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25988915
- icedchai 3y agoOne of the first startups I worked for was all on EC2-Classic. I did enjoy its simplicity. I can understand the need for VPC when integrating with on-premise networks, VPNs, etc. However, you often run into cases where VPC is simply not necessary and over complicates things.
- jedberg 3y agoIf you create a new account, it will work like classic EC2. They will set up the VPC for you behind the scenes. Until you "break the glass" and try to configure a VPC, it will work just like old classic did.
- arianvanp 3y agoThey recently launched VPC Lattice. Which is basically "EC2 Classic networking" but now you pay for it https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/lattice/ https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/lattice/ Though it goes a bit further than just security groups on a flat network. Each HTTP endpoint automatically becomes an IAM resource and you can treat all our services as if they're native to AWS and use the same IAM policies. It's pretty dope!
- aranchelk 3y agoPersonally I wish they would have just bit the bullet and continued Classic with IPv6. Ironically I think post-classic was a regression — it looks a lot more like the infrastructure we had to deal with pre-cloud. My new stuff is mostly on Cloudflare, so now I’m really not thinking about subnets, VPCs, etc.
- xxpor 3y agoIt turns out the way to grow the ec2 business is to get existing companies into the cloud - not just brand new startups. They all have to integrate with on prem networks, which necessitates VPC.
- fatninja 3y agokudos to aws team pulling off the migration. Also its nice to see a CTO of such a big company trying out the tech and doing hands on work.