One of the neat things about AWS is that it’s almost twenty years old. One of the unfortunate things about AWS is… that it’s almost twenty years old. If you’ve been using the platform for a while, it can be hard to notice the pace of change in the underlying “foundational” services. More worryingly, even if you’re not an old saw at AWS scrying, it’s still easy to stumble upon outdated blog posts that speak to the way things used to be, rather than the way they are now. I’ve gathered some of these evolutions that may help you out if you find yourself confused. EC2 In EC2, you can now change security groups and IAM roles without shutting the instance down to do it. You can also resize, attach, or detach EBS volumes from running instances. As of very recently, you can also force EC2 instances to stop or terminate without waiting for a clean shutdown or a ridiculous timeout, which is great for things you’re never going to spin back up. They also added the ability to live-migrate instances to other physical hosts; this manifests as it being much rarer nowadays to see an instance degradation notice. Similarly, instances have gone from a “expect this to disappear out from under you at any time” level of reliability to that being almost unheard of in the modern era. Spot instances used to be much more of a bidding war / marketplace. These days the shifts are way more gradual, and you get to feel a little bit less like an investment banker watching the numbers move on your dashboards in realtime. You almost never need dedicated instances for anything. It’s been nearly a decade since they weren’t needed for HIPAA BAAs. AMI Block Public Access is now default for new accounts, and was turned on for any accounts that hadn’t owned a public AMI for 90 days back in 2023. S3 S3 isn’t eventually consistent anymore–it’s read-after-write consistent. You don’t have to randomize the first part of your object keys to ensure they get spread around and avoid hotspots. ACLs are deprecated an...
First seen: 2025-08-20 16:20
Last seen: 2025-08-21 02:36