[soccerdave]

One thing that I find so amazing about AWS (Amazon Web Services) is that I'm not aware of them ever EOLing one of their apis (I could be wrong). We still have a bunch of code that still uses SimpleDB and even though they haven't promoted SDB for a while, they haven't EOLed it.

[rdrey]

Can confirm that the EC2 API team is still maintaining perfect backwards compatibility with the EC2 SOAP API released in 2006. It's kind of funny that the known issues are all still valid, too :P https://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/Amazon-EC2/353

[tuna-piano]

Exactly this. Companies are still running on-prem software from decades ago, because it's not economical to migrate. Why should the cloud be different?

It's very scary to a purchasing manager at a company to know that when they invest $100k+ in developer/consultant time implementing a solution, that every 3-5 years they will need to spend an additional $xk to simply keep the solution alive!

AWS is doing this right. I can't imagine recommending Google for many cloud use cases, given their propensity to decommission software that companies use!

[reilly3000]

Salesforce gets this right too. All of their APIs get built with the intention of supporting them for 20+ years. Companies can't build on quicksand.

[rubber_duck]

>Why should the cloud be different?

Because you're not running the stack. Relying on any PASS that you can't lock down to a version and deploy on commodity infrastructure means you've accepted the reality of being vulnerable to platform changes - and in a lot of cases this makes sense because the benefits outweigh the cost of staying up to date - but scenarios you describe are not one of them.

[notyourwork]

I think this can be attributed to the companies core values. Amazon is tirelessly customer centric and deprecated an API is painful for customer. Especially if Amazon could write a wrapper for new API and let people continuing using the old.

[jamroom]

I was a big fan of SimpleDB - I feel like if they would have just given it some love (i.e. feature updates and moving it to all SSD) it would have been a really friendly, scaleable "almost SQL" database. I found it way more flexible than DynamoDB for most data models - maybe I am the only one but I think they missed the boat with SimpleDB, and now it's just been relegated to the forgotten side of AWS.

[epalmer]

I agree. I have a little service using SimpleDb and it just works. If the End of Life it then the service will come down. I already have my business partner's agreement on that.

[djhworld]

They still use it internally too, if you ever use ElasticMapReduce (EMR) then you'll probably see SimpleDB charges on your bill (very small amounts) because they use it under the hood to store cluster debugging information

[darkr]

It's been unavailable from the scope of newly created accounts for quite a while

[saurik]

That is very different than pulling it away from existing users.

[darkr]

Indeed, and I think this is a smart move on their part.

[yeukhon]

More impressively they also maintain older instance types such as m1 they rarely pull them off the shelf completely.

[decwakeboarder]

ec2 is ~easy though, they're just smaller VMs on newer hosts.

I'm amazed that things like SimpleDB are still around and supported even though only a handful of engineers in my ~200 person org have heard of it.

[yeukhon]

I believe they aren't allowed to change the hardware spec, so at some point they will not be able to get supplies anymore. As far as SimpleDB, yeah, believe it or not, on AWS bill, it still exist and most support engineers from Amazon don't really have a clue why it's there. I still don't know which service we use is using SimpleDB. Only a few cents, so nobody really care.

[decwakeboarder]

Is that true? They'd still need to adhere to HVM vs. PVM, but that should be it.

[yeukhon]

Well, they advertised m1 as such and such hardware spec. I don't know if in their ToS they state they would be allowed to change the spec without notifying customer. Maybe.

I believe m1 is only available on PV.

[FmrAMZN_TA]

I think this is disingenuous. AWS keeps something running forever, that's true, but in what state?

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121711

(We were well aware of this thread, and others like it, internally)

Something that exists, but has absolutely no investment and unknown support is probably not a great thing. Given that EC2's recent outage was because they hadn't restarted their services in a long time[1], what problems exist here? I think that Google probably should have a SUPER long deprecation policy (24 months feels right), but a year isn't terrible - and I'd rather explicitly get a statement like this than the zombie services elsewhere.

Disclosure: I used to work at AMZN and am highly biased.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

[saurik]

As a big and long time user of AWS I thought it was pretty obvious that SimpleDB was deprecated when DynamoDB came out, and am surprised you think it is somehow bad to maintain a service in a "zombie" state is somehow worse than killing it... the way AWS plays this allows customers using the service to decide to move to a new service because it is better or cheaper, and on their own time scale (!), rather than being forced to drop everything else they are doing to go back to some old project and plan a migration.

I am so sick of companies thinking "a year (or even two!) to migrate is long enough for anyone": do you realize how many services I use? Do you realize how many random products I have built? If every service deprecates their API once every five years and gives everyone two years to update, and you use 20 services (this is common!), that means that every few months you are having to go back through all of your projects you have ever built to rewrite them against some new API. That is absolutely insane.

[boulos]

See my new comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14344415 (I'm on a plane, so late to the party). I'm disappointed in this particular service deprecation, but your broader point applies regardless of the specific service: once you start using several, there's the potential for burning a lot of your engineering budget just rewriting and retooling.

On a meta level, I've seen an incredibly high number of risk averse companies just using EC2/S3 or GCE/GCS. That's not to say I disagree with using tons of services (that's how you get value!), but it's clearly food for thought.

I'd love to see historical data on the various cloud service turndowns, though I suspect there's too little track record to draw meaningful conclusions (and for some folks, abandonware is just as bad as turndown).

[Edit for disclosure since I wasn't in this thread before]

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

[FmrAMZN_TA]

So, then your answer is never deprecate?