AWS Deprecates Two Dozen Services (Most of Which You've Never Heard Of)

Summary

AWS has done its quarterly housecleaning / “Googling” of its services, and deprecated what appears at first glance to be a startlingly long list. However, going through them put my mind at ease, and I’m hoping this post can do the same for you. What Got the Axe 19 services are mothballed (“maintenance mode”), four are being sunset (“you can’t use these anymore after an upcoming date), and one is being end of supported (“it’s finally dead”). A few are alarming: something like “Cloud Directory” seems like it’d be hard to replace, until you think about it and realize that you’ve never used it. Now that you really think about it, you don’t know anyone who has, either. The ones that really jumped out to me are “Amazon Glacier,” “S3 Object Lambda,” “Snowball Edge,” and “CodeCatalyst.” The Ones That Matter Glacier is a red herring. Once upon a time Glacier was its own service, with its own APIs. Now, it’s an S3 storage class. What they’re doing is removing the ability to interact with Glacier via its own APIs, which frankly have always been profoundly annoying to work with. S3 Object Lambdas have always been a bit weird. You can still have Lambdas operate on S3, and at least actual Lambdas are likely to see service improvements; Object Lambdas have been moribund for years. CodeCatalyst was a big deal when it launched, and afterwards nary a peep was heard from it, either from customers or from AWS. This could have been something, but the will to make it that thing clearly has departed AWS along with some of its better talent. That leaves Snowball Edge. This is a weird one, because a bunch of customers have run local EC2 instances on them, as well as using them for data transport jobs. Those customers can continue to do so (for now, at least), but if you’re architecting something new that leverages this I’d suggest making other plans. Everything Else A bunch of the modernization stuff that’s being Googled has simply been dragged into AWS Transform. New service marketing, sam...