[OJFord]

That product x region matrix...

How many products is 'enough' for Amazon, before they begin to consolidate?

I can't be alone in thinking the vast range is off-putting, not to mention the more range there is the more AWS-specific it is, making it simultaneously harder and more important to figure out the right choice...

[Johnny555]

Can't you just pick the product that does what you want? If you need a WAF, use their WAF, if you just need a load balancer, then use an ELB. If you need a data warehouse, use Redshift, if you just need to make simple queries against data stored in S3, use Athena.

Having a wide range of products at a variety of price points and capabilities sounds better than a "one size fits most" approach.

[hug]

There are reasons to be alarmed at the "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" approach.

Like perhaps you decide to use a product that they're not particularly interested in supporting very well, and a year later they decide to shutter the service which performs a crucial role in your environment...

I am not suggesting that Amazon is actually going to do this, but it's certainly more likely than, say, EC2 going away.

[unkoman]

AWS has sunset features before (SimpleDB for example) but only for new customers. Old customers that use the EOL features 1. get a migration path 2. keep the features in their account.

[alexbilbie]

Aside from SimpleDB which was replaced by DynamoDB and Elasticache I'm not aware of any withdrawn services in AWS' history

[andrioni]

Elasticache is still there, and it is still getting updates and new features: Redis got bumped to 3.2 a few months ago, and they also added managed sharding support.