Farewell EC2-Traditional, it’s been swell

Retiring companies isn’t one thing we do at AWS. It’s fairly uncommon. Corporations depend on our choices – their companies actually stay on these companies – and it’s one thing that we take critically. For instance SimpleDB continues to be round, regardless that DynamoDB is the “NoSQL” DB of selection for our clients.

So, two years in the past, when Jeff Barr announced that we’d be shutting down EC2-Classic, I’m positive that there have been no less than a few of you that didn’t consider we’d really flip the swap — that we’d let it run ceaselessly. Effectively, that day has come. On August 15, 2023, we shut down the final occasion of Traditional. And with all the historical past right here, I believe it’s value celebrating the unique model of one of many companies that began what we now know as cloud computing.

EC2 has been round for fairly some time, virtually 17 years. Solely SQS and S3 are older. So, I wouldn’t blame you should you had been questioning what makes an EC2 occasion “Traditional”. Put merely, it’s the community structure. After we launched EC2 in 2006, it was one big community of 10.0.0.0/8. All cases ran on a single, flat community shared with different clients. It uncovered a handful of options, like safety teams and Public IP addresses that had been assigned when an occasion was spun up. Traditional made the method of buying compute lifeless easy, regardless that the stack operating behind the scenes was extremely complicated. “Invent and Simplify” is likely one of the Amazon Leadership Principles in any case…

If you happen to had launched an occasion in 2006, an m1.small, you’ll have gotten a digital CPU the equal of a 1.7 GHz Xeon processor with 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of native disk, and 250 Mb/second of community bandwidth. And it might have value simply $0.10 per clocked hour. It’s fairly unbelievable the place cloud computing has gone since then, with a P3dn.24xlarge offering 100 Gbps of community throughput, 96 vCPUs, 8 NVIDIA v100 Tensor Core GPUs with 32 GiB of reminiscence every, 768 GiB of whole methods reminiscence, and 1.8 TB of native SSD storage, to not point out an EFA to speed up ML workloads.

However 2006 was a distinct time, and that flat community and small assortment of cases, just like the m1.small, was “Traditional”. And on the time it was actually revolutionary. {Hardware} had develop into a programmable useful resource that you might scale up or down at a second’s discover. Each developer, entrepreneur, startup and enterprise, now had entry to as a lot compute as they needed, each time they needed it. The complexities of managing infrastructure, shopping for new {hardware}, upgrading software program, changing failed disks — had been abstracted away. And it modified the way in which all of us designed and constructed functions.

After all the very first thing I did when EC2 was launched was to maneuver this weblog to an m1.small. It was operating Moveable Type and the this occasion was ok to run the server and the native (no RDS but) database. Ultimately I turned it right into a highly-available service with RDS failover, and many others., and it ran there for five+ years till the Amazon S3 Website feature was launched in 2011. The weblog has now been “serverless” for the previous 12 years.

Like we do with all of our companies, we listened to what our clients wanted subsequent. This led us to including options like Elastic IP addresses, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, CloudWatch, and varied new occasion sorts that will higher go well with totally different workloads. By 2013 we had enabled VPC, which allowed every AWS buyer to handle their very own slice of the cloud, safe, remoted, and outlined for his or her enterprise. And it turned the brand new normal. It merely gave clients a brand new stage of management that enabled them to construct much more complete methods within the cloud.

We continued to assist Traditional for the following decade, whilst EC2 advanced and we carried out a completely new virtualization platform, Nitro — as a result of our clients had been utilizing it.

Ten years in the past, throughout my 2013 keynote at re:Invent, I informed you that we needed to “assist in the present day’s workloads in addition to tomorrow’s,” and our dedication to Traditional is the perfect proof of that. It’s not misplaced on me, the quantity of labor that goes into an effort like this — however it’s precisely this kind of work that builds belief, and I’m pleased with the way in which it has been dealt with. To me, this embodies what it means to be buyer obsessed. The EC2 staff stored Traditional operating (and operating effectively) till each occasion was shut down or migrated. Offering documentation, instruments, and assist from engineering and account administration groups all through the method.

It’s bittersweet to say goodbye to one in every of our unique choices. However we’ve come a great distance since 2006 and we’re not performed innovating for our clients. It’s a reminder that constructing evolvable methods is a technique, and revisiting your architectures with an open thoughts is a should. So, farewell Traditional, it’s been swell. Lengthy stay EC2.

Now, go construct!

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