[davesmylie]

I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers.

I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm

[pram]

It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.

[pugz]

If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964

[cmckn]

My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!

[spwa4]

That's crazy. That would never work unless these are just a VLAN configured on existing switches. Even VXLAN wouldn't be able to do that 5 years ago.

[UltraSane]

AWS developed their own custom overlay networking system. It embeds tenant IDs into the packets for isolation

[DevelopingElk]

Running out of IP addresses within that VPC is a real difficulty for services still using it.

[bspammer]

I was also surprised by this, does that mean it used to be impossible to not have a publicly routable IP in AWS?