AWS has announced (via its new Product Lifecycle page) a round of service deprecations, and I couldn’t be happier—for two reasons.
The first is because it’s a round of multiple deprecations, rather than a steady drip-drip-drip of one or two deprecations a week all year long, as we saw in 2024. This is important! When you’re constantly killing services, you make customers nervous that the things they rely upon are potentially next. Why wouldn’t they think that? You’re constantly reminding them that you kill things! When you instead batch them up and provide clear rationales and transition plans, it builds confidence.
The second is that it at long last unifies where service and feature deprecations can be found. Before this, it was a mishmash of blog posts, What’s New items, banners in the documentation, and (worst of all) the product page silently redirecting to something else. Now, there’s a single place we can get the answer straight from the horse’s mouth, rather than your having to trust me, a horse’s ass.
That said, I do have some quibbles.
First, I don’t see a great place to submit services for deprecation; lord knows there are a couple of looney-tunes things I’d love to see the end of. You can probably guess what I’m talking about here.
Second, it’s missing a number of previous deprecations. I get that it’d get sticky quickly, but for the sake of completeness it’s worth digging up the historical deprecations. To wit, I see nothing about RDS on VMware, Import/Export jobs, HoneyCode (yes, it was in beta—but they talked about it more than they did most of their production services), EC2 Classic, WorkLink, Data Pipeline, DeepLens, DeepRacer, the Chime app, Elastic Inference, OpsWorks Puppet, OpsWorks Chef, OpsWorks Stacks, CodeStar, Application Cost Profiler (which I wish could have been killed twice), CloudEndure, MobileHub, Cognito Sync, Elastic Graphics, the Snowmobile (silently killed), WAF Classic, CloudFront’s RMTP support, Lumberyard (of the Zombie Apocalypse Easter egg in the service terms fame), Sumerian, WAM, Nimble Studio, and Alexa for Business.
If you’re going to aggregate killed services, then aggregate them, please. This list is lengthy enough that I didn’t even bother with my recurring “I made one of these services up to see who’s paying attention” trick.
(My thanks to Scott Piper for maintaining a comprehensive list of deprecations that caught a few things my own notes didn’t.)
I get it! Aggregation is hard! And AWS is new at this, to the point where it lacked a cohesive process.
The Upshot
I’m not suggesting that these services and features (which at AWS are only differentiated by “how ambitious a given product owner is”) shouldn’t have been deprecated; in fact, I disagree with none of the entries on their list of 12 newly sunset offerings: Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics, Amazon Pinpoint, AWS IQ, AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT Events, AWS SimSpace Weaver, AWS Panorama, Amazon Inspector Classic, AWS DMS Fleet Advisor, Amazon Connect Voice ID, AWS Private 5G (which was going to be a dated name eventually anyway), and AWS DataSync Discovery.
Nobody used these things, nobody will miss them, and for the outlier customers who disagree with that, AWS is doing its typical white-glove handling of the individual customers who’ll be impacted. I hear a lot of complaints about AWS, but what I never hear is a service customers depend upon being ripped out from underneath them, triggering a bunch of unplanned work.
This is a great change AWS is making, made all the sweeter by the fact that they announced it during the Google IO keynote—which beats Google at its own game, deprecating things.
