AWS is taking out the trash 🗑️

 Everyone went crazy over the service deprecations AWS silently announced over the past few weeks. There has been a lot of criticism and many engineers got serious trust issues as AWS never really used to discontinue services before.

I don’t understand this overly negative sentiment, I believe it was a smart management decision and will be a blessing for both AWS and all customers (except the very few that now need to migrate their applications — hey btw if you need any help with that, I’m here).

All of the deprecated services were barely used and poorly built compared to competitor products or the usual “AWS quality standard”. CodeCommit didn’t stand a chance against GitHub and GitLab. I think they knew CodeCommit wasn’t it for quite some time — its last update was this — 4 years ago:

I myself have never even heard about some of the other services. Here is a list:

• CodeCommit
• Cloud9
• S3 Select
• QLDB
• Cloudsearch
• SimpleDB
• Forecast
• Data Pipeline
• Snowmobile

All of them didn’t gain a lot of user traction, some didn’t get any at all. After AWS introduced the Snowmobile at re:Invent in 2016, I doubt that many saw it live & in action, apparently customers didn’t care about cool trucks and their exabyte-scale capacity.

There is a coolness battle going on in big tech about who can lay off the most people, and AWS doesn’t want to lose this one — so keeping an endless amount of products alive was not an option…

There are also a lot of rumors around which service is dying next. For those worrying that services they depend on might be next on the chopping board, I believe this was rather a one-time cleanup rather than a new norm for AWS. AWS still isn’t Google, and it will never be.

So, calm your balls everyone, it’s gonna be fine.

References

• Medium