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AWS to retire classic EC2 – the compute service that started the IaaS rush

(2021/07/29)


Comment Amazon Web Services has announced the retirement of its third cloud service: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, aka EC2 Classic.

A July 28 [1]post by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr explains that the service was superseded in 2009 by Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, then again by Virtual Private Clouds for Everyone in 2013.

Barr's post explains that customers who signed up with AWS since December 4, 2013, couldn't use EC2 Classic unless they specifically requested it. The bulk of AWS customers will not, therefore, be inconvenienced by the service's retirement.

[2]

Those that do use the service need to be on their toes, because AWS has set a deadline of August 15, 2022 – after which it expects "no remaining EC2 Classic resources present in any AWS account," and all migrations to something else will be complete.

[3]

[4]

As a reminder, on October 31, 2021, AWS will disable EC2 Classic for accounts that don't use the service and stop selling reserved instances. Barr writes that AWS will work with customers to make those migrations as easy as can be.

"We don't plan to disrupt any workloads and will do our best to help you to meet these dates," Barr explains.

[5]

The AWS man also reminisces about how EC2 became a big hit, fast. "We helped Animoto to scale to a then-amazing 3,400 instances when their Facebook app went viral," he writes.

AWS has scaled things rather higher since: in 40th place on the June 2021 update to the Top 500 list of Earth's mightiest supercomputers was a 172,692-core machine that ran for just 24 minutes in the Amazonian cloud.

[6]AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn’t fix for hours due to ‘environmental conditions’ on data centre floor

[7]AWS throws its home-grown Arm CPUs at new memory-intensive instance type

[8]Amazon’s cloudy Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own Mac

[9]BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

EC2 was AWS's third service. It debuted in August 2006, after the March 2006 debut of the Simple Storage Service and the July arrival of Simple Queue Service.

That all three sparked a vast and important change in business computing is not in dispute. Service providers had previously rented remotely-located compute and storage, but AWS made them more accessible and scalable than predecessors. AWS prices were also shockingly low – in a good way – and its services took off.

The Register cannot think of an enterprise computing product or vendor that has not been influenced by AWS and EC2. Makers of on-prem IT have all striven to become more cloud-like ever since EC2 debuted – both in terms of the user experience and by charging for consumption rather than up-front. Whole new software development and deployment practices have emerged to take advantage of elastic resources sold as-a-service.

[10]

EC2 has also left a cultural footprint, as the likes of Netflix realized that cloud computing offered previously unavailable possibilities.

AWS brings in more than $50bn of annual revenue, and is widely regarded as the dominant force in cloud computing.

Barr's post states that AWS will give EC2 Classic "a gold watch and a well-deserved sendoff!"

The service deserves that, and more. ®

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[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-heres-how-to-prepare/

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YQIn7DmrCAp64oWaTBYDWAAAAAI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/aws_eu_central_1_incident/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/17/ec2_graviton_x2gd_memory_intensive/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/02/aws_ec2_mac_pricing/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/04/bbc_embraces_aws_serverless/

[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YQIn7DmrCAp64oWaTBYDWAAAAAI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/



Yes, we're all anti-american terrorists who plan to make the
US economy collapse by inventing lots of new words which will
have to be added to the dictionary, making the US economy
unable to support the ever-growing dictionaries and ensuring
the Americans will be unable to (learn to) spell, leaving them
dead in the water if there's ever a linguistic war between
them and the UK.

- Rik van Riel explaining the real reason behind spelling
mistakes in the linux kernel