[HN Gopher] Farewell EC2-Classic, it's been swell
___________________________________________________________________
Farewell EC2-Classic, it's been swell
Author : alexbilbie
Score : 243 points
Date : 2023-09-01 11:57 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.allthingsdistributed.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.allthingsdistributed.com)
| keltex wrote:
| This is something Google Cloud should learn from. It doesn't
| matter if product XX still makes money or fits in your business
| model. There are people who rely on it. And they'll remember if
| the vendor kept it running trouble free for years. They'll also
| remember if it was arbitrarily shut down or the price was
| suddenly increased by 4x and they had to spend many man hours
| migrating to another option. (Google maps api?)
|
| Then in the future when that same person is responsibly for
| choosing a vendor for a new project, they'll remember.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Google Cloud officially deprecated its EC2 Classic equivalent,
| legacy networks, years ago but they're still running just fine:
|
| https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/legacy
| hotstickyballs wrote:
| Sounds to me like a rug pull is imminent
| rgoulter wrote:
| https://goomics.net/50/
| panarky wrote:
| I'm experiencing a bizarre sense of unreality reading
| comments on a story about Amazon killing EC2-Classic, where
| the first line is "Retiring services isn't something we
| do", while having just read yet another email from Amazon
| warning me about all my files stored in the defunct Amazon
| Drive, and somehow 90% of the discussion is about a
| completely different company discontinuing products.
| jdboyd wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, Amazon Drive is not part of AWS's
| services. Certainly Amazon's consumer cloud services have
| had some big changes over time.
| twothamendment wrote:
| We had some classic ec-2. They gave plenty of warning and
| migration was easy. I think Google is being brought up so
| much because that isn't the typical Google experience
| when they kill things off.
|
| I get your point, if AI were training on this content it
| might conclude that Google killed off its ec-2 product.
| wmf wrote:
| AWS is pretty separate from consumer Amazon.
| master_crab wrote:
| Yup was going to say. AWS treats its customers a bit
| differently than retail Amazon. The latter cuts services
| faster than Google.
| mongol wrote:
| That's a good point. But I am curious how special this Classic
| offering was, compared to what came after. Would migration have
| been hard?
| snewman wrote:
| It's not so much that EC2 Classic offered any features that
| were difficult to live without. It's just that migraine away
| from it means migrating, period. You need to move all of your
| systems, including any data stored on those systems (in
| instance store or EBS), to effectively a new data center.
| Migrating a live production environment can be a pain and/or
| cause downtime.
| [deleted]
| knodi123 wrote:
| > It's just that migraine away from it means migrating,
| period.
|
| Freudian slip?
| brianshaler wrote:
| It's also worth remembering that infrastructure stuck on
| EC2 Classic would have been built so long ago it may
| predate modern cloud tooling and even modern best practices
| around reproducibility and CI/CD.
|
| (EC2 user since 2010)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This. Unless a written guarantee could be offered by the
| cloud provider that migration will be absolutely trouble
| free, why wouldn't customers just stick to what they know
| works?
|
| And if they're not willing to provide a written
| guarantee, then that says a lot.
| snewman wrote:
| In this scenario, it's nothing to do with the cloud
| provider. Migrating a live production system is
| inherently difficult. You can make a reasonable analogy
| to moving houses - say, with two kids who are in school,
| and while you and your spouse are both working. No matter
| what guarantees you're given regarding the condition of
| the new house, simply moving all of your stuff (while you
| are using it) is a big hassle.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| In this example, it wouldn't be the guarantees for the
| new house, which presumably would have been examined and
| accepted well beforehand, it would be guarantees for the
| moving process itself.
| acdha wrote:
| Exactly - and with fewer managed services back then
| they'd also be more likely to have hand-rolled servers
| doing things which you'd now try to hand off to a managed
| service. I remember entire servers running small tasks
| which you'd now have, say, CloudFront or an ALB invoking
| Lambdas or at least sending it to a container.
| flir wrote:
| Google Reader. Never forget.
| sneak wrote:
| I miss Google Search being good and useful and not covered in
| intrusive ads much more than I miss something easily replaced
| with local software or Feedly.
|
| Almost everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search,
| and YouTube could evaporate for all I care. Google's problem
| is not that they cancel stuff, it's the everpresent need to
| grow revenue and embed annoying ads into more and more of
| everyone's daily lives. I'd love for them to cancel Gmail
| with a very short notice period.
|
| The endgame for Google is every Google user loaded full of
| energy drinks watching ads continuously for 20 hours a day.
| Every lifestyle that's less profitable than that is something
| Google will eventually try to engineer away.
| RektBoy wrote:
| What ADs? Install uBlock.
| moomin wrote:
| But Reader _wasn't_ easily replaced by local software. They
| centralised social usage of RSS, then killed it. Yes, you
| can still run an RSS reader, but RSS and blogs as a a model
| of social networking? Never came back.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and
| YouTube could evaporate for all I care_
|
| Honestly, even YouTube could evaporate and it really
| wouldn't make a difference. 99.9999% of YouTube is just
| mindless entertainment, which is 100% fungible with every
| other form of entertainment. The amount of actually unique,
| insightful, worthwhile content on YouTube is a rounding
| error, and will find other places to live.
| macintux wrote:
| If the useful YouTube content scattered to multiple
| alternatives, it would immediately become far less
| useful. Discovery is a big part of YouTube's value
| proposition for me.
| nine_k wrote:
| AFAIK more than 95% of all email traffic is spam. I still
| consider email an absolutely vital tool, despite the
| efficiency below a steam engine.
|
| Same with YouTube: the small sliver of content I care
| about is important enough for me to pay for YouTube
| premium.
|
| Sometimes people compare something to a gold mine, to
| emphasize how rich that is. A typical gold mine extracts
| several grams of good _per tonne_ of rock, that is, a few
| parts _per million_.
|
| Don't cry about the Sturgeon's law; embrace it and
| celebrate what you can extract.
| kibwen wrote:
| YouTube isn't analogous to email, it's analogous to
| Gmail. We were hosting video in the 90s, and the cost of
| storage, bandwidth, and compute have become orders of
| magnitude cheaper since then. Video hosting is not magic
| that only YouTube can pull off.
| Kuinox wrote:
| I started to use Kagi instead of google search. Since, it's
| difficult to get back on google, the results are so much
| worse.
| xnx wrote:
| What's an example search that's better on Kagi?
| recursive wrote:
| "Radiator". I just picked a word at random. All the other
| ones are better too.
| freeAgent wrote:
| Funny enough, I just tried it and I agree. I have pinned
| Wikipedia in Kagi, so that came out on top rather than a
| link to Autozone at Google. Google's "Places" results
| were also (significantly) farther away yet no more
| relevant than Kagi's.
|
| So...yes. Radiator.
| Galanwe wrote:
| It's not really the ads that killed Google search for me.
| it's more the over agressive minmaxed SEO that makes most
| of results garbage.
| gjvc wrote:
| Can you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?
| ok123456 wrote:
| Not bad enough to be outright spam with just enough
| relevance to be shown in the top ten search results. Try
| finding product reviews, or product comparison articles.
| It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything,
| but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be
| indexed.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| It's obvious LLM tripe when you click into the article
| and it begins with several worthless paragraphs
| describing why someone would be interested in the topic
| and how things can sometimes go wrong...
|
| Yes, I already knew that. That's why I'm here.
|
| It might be an attempt to copy customer service 'empathy'
| but it has the opposite effect: angering me because my
| time is wasted with this crap, and I have to scroll
| several screens to find what I need.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Tangent: your use of the word "tripe" here is spot-on.
|
| The secondary definition (nonsense) works, but I'm
| talking about the apt metaphor of its primary definition:
| offal that's technically edible but comes from low-
| quality parts of the digestive system which are literally
| filled with feces.
|
| LLM-generated SEO spam should always be called "tripe".
| moomin wrote:
| Honestly, a lot of this isn't LLM stuff. It's "people
| being paid pittance".
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Good point; maybe all clickbait and SEO spam, regardless
| of human provenance, counts as "tripe".
| swader999 wrote:
| And the content itself is just a reflection of the
| search. Whole web is turning to rot such that the only
| few remaining great sites don't even need indexing
| because well there's so few left.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say
| anything, but uses the right keywords and enough
| coherency to be indexed.
|
| Or some site that "aggregates" Stackoverflow, Quora and
| whatnot. Pure hell and I wish everything bad possible on
| this planet to the people who have implemented this kind
| of scam.
| saaspirant wrote:
| I block them using uBlacklist in Firefox. My blacklist is
| growing.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Not OP.
|
| I believe "minimaxed" in this context refers to
| optimizing profits while trying to keep search results
| useful to users.
|
| The term comes from game theory where a player tries to
| maximize their gains while minimizing their losses:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
| brianshaler wrote:
| For me it's when they stopped showing results that
| include your keywords and instead a random smattering of
| anything broadly related to the topic being searched for.
| jvolkman wrote:
| You can use quotes around keywords.
|
| https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-
| searc...
| geraldcombs wrote:
| This shifted from "can" to "absolutely have to" a long
| time ago for my use cases.
| dekhn wrote:
| even quotes don't work 100% of the time- if there is
| strong signal to show another result, it will be shown
| even if it isn't a quote-match. Previous user clicks are
| the top ranking signal.
|
| IIUC "verbatim mode" is supposed to do something like
| this. https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-
| your-term...
| zbrozek wrote:
| When I use Google search-which is rare these days-I
| exclusively use verbatim mode.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| I've had google searches disregard my quoted query.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Often it's not even related at all.
|
| For example, Google often prioritizes obscure music bands
| or albums even for generic or well-known terms.
| voytec wrote:
| I see Reader as Google's attack on RSS' popularity. The
| product was killed off when its job was accomplished.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I think it just was never going to get the mass adoption it
| needed to justify the upkeep.
| lolinder wrote:
| The upkeep was apparently 12 engineers and they had tens
| of millions of users. It doesn't take that many users to
| justify 12 engineers plus infra, so it sounds like it was
| more that Google doesn't care to operate any product
| unless it will have users in the hundreds of millions.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It doesn't take that many <revenue generating> users to
| justify 12 engineers plus infra,
|
| Otherwise, those 12 engineers and infra are pure negative
| on the balance sheet
| LamaOfRuin wrote:
| Having basically all their users (well, as much as for
| any of their revenue generating products anyway) be
| revenue generating would require practically no effort
| for google specifically. It fit their revenue model
| perfectly. It is trivial to put the exact same ads in
| there as they already had on search and gmail, and it is
| stickier than search or gmail.
| pests wrote:
| That would seem a little rude wouldn't it?
|
| Taking content from another site, maybe that has ads, and
| then displaying it in Reader next to your own ads
| instead?
|
| I think it would have caused some issues in the RSS world
| that such a big player was using everyone's content for
| themselves.
|
| I used Reader daily back then. It's strange to think my
| current method of manually checking sites for updates was
| solved so long ago.
| dylan604 wrote:
| LOL. the Googs worrying about being rude is charmingly
| funny in a webcomic kind of way. they removed their tag
| line of don't be evil. you think they are concerned about
| being rude?
|
| however, this is precisely what Reddit was complaining
| about 3rd party apps doing to their content. everyone was
| trying to pivot to blaming AI scrappers, but that's just
| FUD.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Broadly, I think some business models are better suited
| for smaller companies than Google for sure.
|
| Reader probably didn't have much B2B potential and was
| maybe profitable but yeah, they tend to swing for larger
| audiences.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| By the end it had an upkeep of one dude's 20% time. It
| was very reliable and the Google infrastructure didn't
| require much ongoing maintenance at that time, the
| servers just kept on trucking.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I don't think they ever put ads on it, really wonder what
| the decision process on that was.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Many blogs have ads on them. So you'd be stripping ads
| and replacing them with your own - not cool.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Well, sure, but they could just not show ads for blogs
| that didn't use google ads.
|
| The ones that do... Well, why not show ads for them as
| originally intended?
| lolinder wrote:
| Apparently what actually happened is Reader was put
| together by a team that really cared about it, but always
| had to fight the corporation to keep it alive. They finally
| lost the political game to Google Plus, which stole a lot
| of their key people before it imploded:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-
| death-2013-r...
|
| The article above is actually very interesting, because the
| story it tells is that Google's two highest-profile
| failures are actually one failure. Facebook freaked them
| out so much that they scrambled to build something
| comparable with Google Plus. Google Plus stole most of the
| company's mind share but was executed so poorly that it
| never went anywhere. The company got major egg on their
| face from suffocating Reader to make Plus, then again when
| Plus died after having been pushed so hard.
| nostrademons wrote:
| _Three_ greatest failures. Google+ started the trend of
| having Google product strategy set by executives who were
| accountable to the CEO /CFO rather than users/customers,
| vs. the previous bottom-up culture of engineers who
| passionately wanted to serve the user. That culture
| change is the root of the issues we're talking about in
| this thread.
| slyall wrote:
| No because if anything (the effect might have been small)
| it reduced the power of the open web and many websites
| (which Google tied togeather) and encouraged people to go
| to walled gardens ( Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc )
| which are controlled by other companies.
| flir wrote:
| A lot of heavyweight bloggers and aggregators used Reader
| in their toolchains - it was very good at surfacing
| trending content. I don't think the effect on the
| blogging ecosystem was small.
|
| I could believe they were clearing a path for G+ and
| Discover on Android.
| freeAgent wrote:
| What's frustrating is that Reader would have been
| complementary to Google+. It could have served as a huge
| funnel by which users could discover content to share on
| Google+. That's how I used to use Reader (though at the
| time I found content that I shared other places, such as
| Facebook, Digg, or Reddit).
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Obligatory reminder that RSS is alive and well. It remains
| popular. I both subscribe to RSS, and support it on my blog.
| You can too.
| flir wrote:
| Still use it - I even read HN via RSS - but I've never
| found a tool with the critical mass of users you need to
| show trending content the way GR did.
| freeAgent wrote:
| That's true. I use Newsblur. It has social features, but
| the community is so small and the social aspect is so
| limited that it has little value. With that said, the
| people who engage with it tend to be authentic users
| interested in high-quality content and respectful
| discussion. Discovery of other users is terrible, though.
| You basically have to stumble upon them if they're
| interacting with an article already in your RSS feeds.
| flir wrote:
| theoldreader, same problem.
|
| Idle musing 1: A mechanism for all these small readers to
| federate their trending content? Out of many comes one?
|
| Idle musing 2: These tools were mostly written a decade
| ago. It might be possible, with the current state of the
| art, to extract a more useful signal out of a smaller
| pool of users.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I am fucking pissed at how Google created tons of make work
| for me by killing old Universal Analytics and replacing it
| with an inferior product.
|
| OTOH, I successfully skipped the whole AMP saga because I
| could tell from the start that it was bullshit.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Universal Analytics used third-party cookies. Support for
| them has been removed from all major browsers due to
| privacy issues.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I agree with everything you wrote, except for the very last
| sentence. This is just wishful thinking. First of all _" when
| the same person is responsible_" is a very big _if_ , and then
| no two buying decisions are the same and even if the person
| with decision-making power remembers it'll be just one point on
| a long list.
| rob74 wrote:
| OTOH, I have a feeling that "nobody ever got fired for
| choosing AWS" will become the new "nobody ever got fired for
| buying IBM", so...
| ilyt wrote:
| Sure but if you ask online and those people will be yelling
| "dont pick <company> they will pull a rug from under you" at
| every occasion...
| bilalq wrote:
| Google clearly doesn't care about their reputation. Their
| shutdown of Pixel Pass before users got a chance to upgrade was
| just ridiculous[1]. It's hard to quantify the impact that this
| poor reputation has on their business. Their revenue is still
| growing, but it's definitely not where it could be.
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/23851107/google-
| graveyard...
| skizm wrote:
| I haven't spun up anything in the cloud in a while. I used to
| dabble in both AWS and Digital Ocean. Usually went with DO
| because it seemed simpler and my projects were super small (and
| they had a lot of relevant guides to spinning up X, Y, and Z
| service on their systems). What is the difference between
| EC2-classic and whatever is available today? Are you still able
| to just get a linux box with a public IP address?
| AaronM wrote:
| You have to create at minimum a vpc, internet gateway and at
| least one subnet/route table pointing to the igw
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > You have to create at minimum a vpc
|
| A default VPC is created automatically. For simple projects,
| that's good enough.
|
| > internet gateway and at least one subnet/route table
| pointing to the igw
|
| Only if you have a private subnet.
| skizm wrote:
| Oh man, I don't know any of these concepts (rather I've heard
| of all of them, but don't know how they apply in practice).
| I'm probably not the target customer for AWS any more haha.
| Been so long since I did anything web related. Time to find
| some networking for dummies youtube channels I guess.
| manojlds wrote:
| Nah, it's just EC2 you are not a target of. Checkout AWS
| Lightsail
| manojlds wrote:
| I think there's Lightsail for such use now -
| https://aws.amazon.com/free/compute/lightsail-vs-ec2/
| mgkimsal wrote:
| And I think that's been around for at least 8 years - I
| remember looking at it in 2015 - or maybe 2016(?). Was
| working with a small startup that needed a small bit of
| hosting, and they were trying to do it all at AWS because...
| name cachet. They were getting lost in trying to cobble
| together lambda, s3 and some other stuff to basically host
| some JS and images. I suggested Linode (had a working
| example) but "that's not enterprise" (this was a small pre-
| revenue startup testing ideas). I then suggested (and setup)
| a lightsail instance for $5/month doing what was needed, and
| it too was rebuffed as not enterprise(y) enough. Even being
| 'at AWS' wasn't enough to start with - they wanted to hit the
| ground running with lambdas, microservices, multi-region load
| balancing and complex IAM stuff.
|
| Stated justification was "If we don't bake this in now, it'll
| be harder to do later", but it was mostly a couple fokls in
| charge wanted to learn new stuff (someone said that out loud
| later, confirming my concerns about resume-driven-
| development).
|
| EDIT: FWIW, my couple small experiences with lightsail itself
| were fine. Seems like a decent onramp to ease in to the AWS
| ecosystem, if that's on your roadmap.
| michelledepeil wrote:
| Yes, but the reality is that EC2 is optimized for a target
| audience who wants to customize the deployment beyond a linux
| box with a public IP.
|
| But iirc following the "Launch Instance" wizard and choosing
| defaults for everything, as well as a (default) public subnet
| gives the exact thing you're asking for.
| davedx wrote:
| I still remember when I worked at Serif and we needed web hosting
| for our new social media website that would be integrated into
| our scrapbooking desktop software. There were a lot of shiny new
| technologies around at the time (as there always are). One of
| them was Microsoft Silverlight, and we implemented its "Deep
| Zoom" into the website so our users could easily zoom around in
| the scrapbooks that got published and enjoy the details.
|
| Another was AWS. I think EC2 had just launched, and we happened
| to be re-evaluating where we hosted our web properties, because
| we thought the social media website would get a bit more traffic
| than our older "web components" offering. It was pretty exciting
| that we could just click a button and spin up an instance in the
| US, or in Ireland, or Amsterdam. And if the instance died, just
| click a button again to spin up another one.
|
| As it is today, so it was then: the simple UI hid quite some
| complexity. There were the different kinds of storage to learn
| about, and which ones were persistent, and which weren't. If I
| remember rightly those early EC2 instances weren't as reliable as
| they seem to be today either, we actually lost one or two
| completely and had to rebuild them, so we snapshotted a lot.
|
| There was no infrastructure as code or DevOps, but we did
| implement our own highly available cluster. One of the engineers
| I worked with actually wrote it from scratch, in C++ (we were
| primarily a C++ company). It would monitor the databases in the
| different EC2 instances, and ensure the database cluster stayed
| alive.
|
| We didn't really know what we were doing, what was smart, there
| weren't any cloud architects around back then. But the technology
| worked really well. Once we got past the initial hiccups, we
| built a pretty active internet community. The website itself was
| built in PHP with MySQL, and used XSLT to transform XML data
| (that in turn was built from relational data from SQL) to
| generate the HTML. There wasn't a great deal of JavaScript, just
| some jQuery (another technology I just randomly stumbled on while
| working on this project that also changed quite a few things).
| Progressive enhancement, and server-side rendering.
|
| I'm trying to remember how we deployed it. I think we used
| FileZilla, and then the C++ cluster software would clone the
| uploaded files to the other EC2 instances in the other AZ's.
|
| I can't remember how much peak traffic we had, but in retrospect,
| we probably didn't _need_ a server in 3 different AZ 's. But
| damn, it was fun to work on, and it gave me my first introduction
| to AWS.
|
| Good times.
| pirate787 wrote:
| I remember those days, there was no database layer at AWS so we
| used instances with Elastic Block store for durability.
| davedx wrote:
| Yeah, that was it! It was so confusing initially trying to
| figure out what should go in the EC2 instances' local disk
| storage, what should go into EBS, and what should go into S3.
| It all seems so obvious now of course...
| viraptor wrote:
| It was also confusing to the users. I remember seeing a
| post every other week on HN about a service going down or
| losing data because they accidentally used the ephemeral
| devices for their databases. Haven't seen one of those in
| ages.
| psadauskas wrote:
| Yup, and for performance, you would RAID Stripe a bunch of
| EBS volumes together. But sometimes you'd get a volume on a
| noisy neighbor, and its performance would be terrible.
|
| Where I worked at the time, I wrote some Chef tooling that
| would hdperf the volumes it provisioned, and if some weren't
| any good it would provision more until it got 8 good ones.
| Only then would it RAID them together, then deprovision the
| bad ones.
|
| Now they have provisioned iops, and I haven't seen a slow EBS
| volume in a decade.
| 38 wrote:
| LightSail is decent:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail
| gnfargbl wrote:
| > one giant network of 10.2.0.0/8
|
| Huh? Do they mean 10.0.0.0/8, or 10.2.0.0/16 (/15 would also
| work), or is this a new CIDR notation? Something specific to AWS,
| maybe?
| crabbone wrote:
| Technically, it doesn't matter what number you stick after the
| first stop in a /8 network. Might as well write it as
| 10.X.X.X/8, it's all the same. I'm not sure where I've seen
| this done, but >90% certain some of the ip commands output this
| kind of CIDRs by simply concatenating the IP of the node you
| are querying and the size of the network.
| [deleted]
| gilbetron wrote:
| You encounter that all the time in the networking world -
| formally the bits outside of the prefix length should be 0, but
| informally you'll often see set bits. Often it is a way to say
| "the subnet that includes this ip address". So 192.254.33.12/16
| or something. Could just be a typo, too. Regardless, it doesn't
| really matter what is in the bits outside of the prefix length,
| because they get zeroed out when used.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Yeah, but that makes sense -- it's a shorthand for "the IP
| address 192.254.33.12 which is in the /16 subnet".
| londons_explore wrote:
| So if I'm understanding correctly, all the classic instances were
| migrated to more modern types with no intervention from the
| account holder?
|
| Did they suffer a reboot during that migration, or was it done
| via some live-migration process (it's hard to live-migrate off a
| virtualization platform that was never designed with that in
| mind!).
|
| What about the original network setup? Is that still emulated, or
| might some customer applications have broken?
| motoboi wrote:
| The had to be restarted, but not only that, has to have their
| networks reconfigured.
|
| But they gave people YEARS to do that, and tracked down every
| user to help them if necessary.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > has to have their networks reconfigured.
|
| I don't see why every user couldn't be auto-created a virtual
| network with the same 10.x.x.x IP addresses as their original
| machine had - and therefore there is no need to do any
| reconfiguration on the users side.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Because there's more than just the local IP address to
| worry about.
|
| Remember, _all_ of EC2 Classic was in a single /8 of
| private IPs. You could communicate with EC2 instances _in
| another account_ via their _private_ IP address.
|
| If you have two instances in different accounts that need
| to communicate, upgrading from EC2 Classic to VPC couldn't
| be done automatically.
| motoboi wrote:
| Because people could have that same network on-promises on
| the other side of the VPN (I have).
| londons_explore wrote:
| But that isn't a _new_ problem if the same user already
| uses that address - you 're just leaving them with the
| same issue they already had.
| devit wrote:
| It's not clear, but my interpretation is that they contacted
| every account holder, somehow convinced them to migrate
| (perhaps with discounts and/or threats of termination) and then
| shut down once everyone migrated.
|
| Would be very interesting to learn how that was possible, it
| seems surprising to me that there wasn't even one instance that
| the owner forgot about or just was unwilling to do any work on.
|
| It's possible that credit card expiration was the key, as that
| may have automatically disabled almost all forgotten accounts.
| crabbone wrote:
| They don't need to threaten. Their SLAs don't offer to run
| VMs indefinitely. AWS will send you an email about shutting
| down your VM if, eg. they need to rotate the disk used for
| storing VM image etc. It's somewhere there in the contract,
| and it's a usual process for someone who keeps long-running
| VMs in EC2.
| devit wrote:
| Do they really not do live migration or at least auto-
| restart (if configured) in those cases?
| tekla wrote:
| Its your responsibility to make your systems resistant to
| failure
| acdha wrote:
| They have live migration now (for many years) but they
| didn't back in the early era. I'm not sure they set it up
| for the classic environment but I think they must have -
| in the early 2010s you could get notices that your VM's
| host had failed or was about to fail and you needed to
| launch a new one but I think that stopped by around 2015
| as I had servers running for a deprecated project which
| were finally shutdown this decade and it seems like
| rather good luck not to have any failures in 7+ years on
| old hardware.
| crabbone wrote:
| I received last such email about a year ago for a VM in
| either free-tier or like the cheapest one available. This
| probably has to do with VM flavor you choose as well as
| with the time you created it.
| acdha wrote:
| Definitely possible - I only had about ten old servers
| but that's a nice stretch without a hardware failure.
| crabbone wrote:
| I don't know the details of this particular migration, but I
| used to have a VM in some low-price tier that was running for a
| long time (few years), and, eventually AWS sent me an email
| telling they are going to shut it down for maintenance reasons.
|
| Guess this was something similar. VMs, if not specifically
| configured to be able to move cannot really be moved
| automatically. Think about eg. randomness of ordering in PCIe
| bus (i.e. after moving the devices may not come up in the same
| order as before moving), various machine ids, like MAC address
| -- if you don't make sure VM isn't affected by these changes,
| it's likely that it will be, if moved.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The clouds have figured this out:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3186411.3186415
| crabbone wrote:
| That's a very bold claim :)
|
| If you _prepare_ for migration, then it will work. If you
| don 't -- it might or might not work, and it depends on way
| too many things to be confident that it will.
|
| For example, in our VM deployment process we heavily rely
| on PXE boot and our code that runs during initramfs and
| also after pivot. So, even if whatever you have in the
| hypervisor and the virtualized OS has somehow managed to
| solve the moving problem, our own (screwy) code might not
| be so smart.
|
| In general, the more of the underlying infrastructure you
| touch, the harder it will be to move you, unless you
| specifically prepare to move. Eg. what if you set up BMC
| for various components on your system? What if your code
| relies on knowing particular details of hardware to which
| you were given pass-through access from your VM, like, eg.
| you record somewhere the serial number of your disk in
| order to be able to identify it on next boot, but suddenly
| that disk is gone?
|
| Even simpler: MIG flag on NVidia's GPUs is stored in the
| persistent writable memory of the GPU itself. Suppose your
| VM has moved to a different location and is connected to a
| different (but compatible) GPU -- you need to run the code
| that sets the flag again and then reboot the system in
| order to start working with the GPU, but the host may not
| be even aware of the fact that you need that particular
| setting.
|
| The guest side of things needs to be prepared to move, to
| mitigate these problems.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Think about eg. randomness of ordering in PCIe bus (i.e.
| after moving the devices may not come up in the same order as
| before moving), various machine ids, like MAC address -- if
| you don't make sure VM isn't affected by these changes, it's
| likely that it will be, if moved.
|
| QEMU/KVM/libvirt/... are idempotent when it comes to hardware
| the VM sees - the exception is the CPU model, that one can't
| be changed on the fly without at least rebooting the VM in
| question, and hardware in passthrough mode like GPUs.
|
| All the VM sees from a live migration is a few seconds of
| "lost" time, as if someone had stopped the CPU clock.
| jseutter wrote:
| No, migrating did involve intervention from the account holder.
| More information here:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-her...
|
| It seems like AWS spent time, people and money to migrate
| customers off EC2 classic. They made a fairly good effort to
| automate the process and make it less painful for customers.
| For example: https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/ssm-migrate-
| ec2classic-v...
|
| The original network was from an everyone-on-the-same-subnet
| model to a you get your own subnet, so yes, customer
| applications could break in the process. People do all sorts of
| non-smart things for good reasons, like hardcoding an ip
| address in /etc/hosts when a nameserver is down. And then they
| forget to change it back. To do these sorts of migrations well
| requires a sort of stick and carrot approach. The stick, which
| is we want to shut down this service and will eventually refuse
| you service, and the carrot, which includes automation,
| reminders that people need maintenance windows for their
| applications, clear directions, and above all, willingness to
| deal with people and actually talk to them.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Looking at that blog post, I think AWS could have done the
| migration for most users with no involvement of the user
| themselves.
|
| In the ideal world, they would have written software to live-
| migrate VM's to the new platform and emulate the old
| networking.
|
| Emulating old stuff _should_ be pretty easy, because hardware
| moves on, and an instance back in 2006 probably had far lower
| performance expectations - and therefore even a fairly poor
| performance emulation will be sufficient to meet user needs.
| lclarkmichalek wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't do that in the 14 years since VPCs
| were introduced?
| TheDong wrote:
| "emulate the old networking" is something that can't be
| done per customer, and the new platform makes networking
| per customer.
|
| Let's say I have my aws account "account1", and my friend
| has their account "account2", both running classic. We
| could have both talked to each other's instances by their
| _private IPs_ even though they're in different accounts.
| AWS has no way of knowing those two instances are related,
| other than that they're both in classic.
|
| Sure, AWS could make a global cross-account emulated flat
| network, but at that point, it's probably cheaper to just
| use the real thing, which was already built and
| functions... and at that point, you're not migrating them
| to "the new platform", but rather to "ec2 classic 2"
| londons_explore wrote:
| If there is a small number of classic users, a single
| special case in the code to have all classic users
| connected to a single network of an admin account seems
| very doable...
|
| I wonder if perhaps part of the reason for not doing this
| was they were worried about malware spreading across that
| shared internal network from one VM without security
| patches to the next VM without security patches.
|
| Even if that were the case, they could monitor all VM's
| on the classic network, and any VM which doesn't contact
| another users VM's for ~1 month would have the ability to
| do so be blocked.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Minor nitpick, 10.2.0.0/8 is not a valid subnet mask. The largest
| subnet you can make starting with 10.2.0.0 is 10.2.0.0/15. As far
| as I can tell everything was done in 10.0.0.0/8 but Amazon has
| took down EC2-Classic documentation.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150302235811/https://docs.aws....
| computerfriend wrote:
| I believe it is valid, the /8 masks it so the 2 might as well
| be a 0.
| loopdoend wrote:
| Was wondering when they'd finally shut that box down, I was
| keeping it on just to troll them.
| stilwelldotdev wrote:
| "Retiring services isn't something we do at AWS. It's quite
| rare."
|
| I read this while I was taking a break from working on an epic to
| migrate our stuff off of OpsWorks before it gets shut down in
| May.
| blurker wrote:
| Bloody shame, OpsWorks was a great service in my experience. I
| built a few clusters with it before Kubernetes and terraform
| were a thing.
|
| That said, I heard from folks at AWS that it was not well
| maintained and a bit of a mess behind the scenes. I can't say
| I'm surprised it's being shut down given where the technology
| landscape has shifted since the service was originally offered.
|
| RIP OpsWorks.
| mh- wrote:
| and I, while dealing with the fallout of migrating something
| from AWS Data Pipeline (it entered "Maintenance Mode" and they
| removed console access earlier this year.)
| hughesjj wrote:
| Data pipelines was also a perennial shit show behind the
| scenes. Turns out integration is a lot of complexity even if
| the service is "simple" in concept and doesn't need to be so
| real time.
|
| I feel like data pipelines and swf have been replaced by step
| functions+event bus+lambdas/fargate. We've furthered
| abstractions over time, and that's a good thing.
|
| _Edit_ that said no idea how they scale in comparison
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| That was jarring for me, I wasn't quite sure what the article
| wanted to say at first. Title "we're doing X", body "we don't
| do X here".
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Chef has been dying for a long time and was beaten to death
| when the company was bought by some VC and everyone was fired
| a couple of years ago. I can understand why the service is
| going away as Chef and Puppet are not exactly gaining
| marketshare.
|
| AWS rarely retires services and when they do they pretty much
| give months/year(s) worth of notice before forcing you to
| migrate which is very nice.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| I was overbilled for this service in 2011 and Amazon insists to
| this day that they do not have records about this even if I
| forward them the emails :)
| supazek wrote:
| I setup an AWS account in college before I had ever worked and
| dealt with enterprise security. Didn't use the account for
| anything. No 2FA and a weak password and all of a sudden I have
| a $15,000 bill from a crypto mining script. Worked with Amazon,
| got everything cleaned up, turned on 2FA and was only charged
| $100. Pretty generous considering it was entirely my fault
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Someone else's fraud isn't your fault.
|
| Amazon can damned well run password strength / compromise
| tests and validations.
| [deleted]
| DavidThorv wrote:
| [flagged]
| tabeth wrote:
| This is a level of support all software companies should aspire
| to. It's also what the enterprise likes to see and will give you
| money for.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I continue to choose AWS for the companies I work at not
| because their offerings are better, but because their support
| is so far superior.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I had an interview somewhere that was using Google Cloud. My
| responsibility would be to own all of that (the CTO was who
| was interviewing me) but I took the interview since I wanted
| to understand why and wether or not I actually had the power
| to change that (given I would own it).
|
| I didn't, and didn't take the job and Google Cloud was a
| major reason for it. I did not want my job at the risk of
| Google's decisions. I just don't trust them.
|
| AWS may not be perfect but I don't worry as much that a
| decision on their part is going to really screw me over.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _The complexities of managing infrastructure, buying new
| hardware, upgrading software, replacing failed disks -- had been
| abstracted away_
|
| ...and replaced by the complexities of AWS. I mean, even in the
| pre-AWS days, it 's not like you had to buy the hardware or
| replace the failed disks yourself, web hosters did that for you.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure, but it _often_ required a) you to detect and diagnose it
| on your own and b) a couple hours to a couple of weeks for them
| to agree and swap it out. Versus the ability to click a few
| buttons and have a brand new server on separate hardware.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > it's not like you had to buy the hardware or replace the
| failed disks yourself, web hosters did that for you.
|
| That's an oversimplification. Yes, you didn't go into the data
| center and replace the disk yourself, but it was a very
| different process than what you get with AWS.
|
| There are still plenty of web hosts that operate the old
| fashioned way if people want to use them. There is a reason
| people prefer services like AWS though.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I mean, even in the pre-AWS days, it 's not like you had to
| buy the hardware or replace the failed disks yourself, web
| hosters did that for you._
|
| Given no single _web hoster_ has grown to the size of AWS /
| Azure, it is safe to assume just which complexities the
| industry is willing to _tolerate_. I mean, Oracle still rakes
| in billions, despite everything.
| dangus wrote:
| AWS doesn't have to be complex if those aren't your
| requirements, you can use something like Lightsail. If all you
| need is a VPS, get a VPS. (Though if that's what you need, I
| personally like Hetzner more).
|
| But AWS _needs_ to be complex to handle the needs of huge
| organizations.
|
| I will also point out that the AWS console EC2 launching
| interface has come such a long way. So much to the complexity
| is handled for you.
| SillyUsername wrote:
| Now all they need to do is actually allow a fixed budget instead
| of possible runaway credit card charges.
|
| Microsoft do it, and IIRC Google, so why not Amazon?
|
| I've been waiting for this for about 20 years too :D
| bdcravens wrote:
| It would kill the ecosystem of highly paid "cloud cost
| optimization" consultants who do little more than flip a few
| switches in the AWS console.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Because it would make them less money and their customers
| aren't so price sensitive.
| brianshaler wrote:
| Off topic, but I'm confused about the IPv4 notation in this
| quote:
|
| > When we launched EC2 in 2006, it was one giant network of
| 10.2.0.0/8.
|
| In my understanding, /8 means the first octet would be fixed
| (10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255) and I'm having trouble understanding
| the significance of the 2 here. If the 2 is significant, wouldn't
| you write it as /16? Given the source and my confidence on this
| notation, I feel like there must be some meaning an expert can
| glean from this. If so, I'm curious to learn. If it's just a
| typo, then that's fine and I apologize if this is nit-picky.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| I think it must be a typo. because 10.2.0.0/8 is not a valid
| subnet mask. The largest subnet you can make starting with
| 10.2.0.0 is 10.2.0.0/15.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's still a valid subnet notation, the 2 just doesn't mean
| anything.
|
| When you take the logical AND of the IP and the expanded
| mask, you'll just end up with 10.0.0.0 as the network address
| and 10.255.255.255 as the broadcast address.
| smileybarry wrote:
| I'm guessing it's a typo, but maybe it was a
| 10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255 subnet with EC2-Classic machines
| allocating purely from 10.2.0.0-10.2.255.255, and
| 10.x.0.0-10.x.255.255 was allocated for other services?
| werner wrote:
| You are right, it was a typo. It should have been 10.0.0.0/8.
| Updated that in the blog, also resolved a confusion about the
| memory in a P3dn.24xlarge.
|
| Thanks for your critical reading!
| thargor90 wrote:
| You are right. The /8 is 10.0.0.0/8.
|
| I guess it's not a typo, but a weird way to write 10.0.0.0/8
| excluding 10.1.0.0/16 .
| mlyle wrote:
| It doesn't exclude 10.1.0.0/16, or any of the rest of 10/8.
| gilbetron wrote:
| Formally it should be 10.0.0.0/8, but you'll often encounter
| CIDRs written less formally by including set bits outside of
| the cidr prefix length. Often it is shorthand for "the subnet
| that includes this IP address", so 192.254.33.12/16, for
| instance. Or it might be a typo! ;)
| unilynx wrote:
| I would interpret 192.254.33.12/16 to mean 'host
| 192.254.33.12 in a /16 subnet'.
|
| That's also the notation `ip` on Linux supports
| chacham15 wrote:
| My thought was that 10.2.0.0/16 is part of the 10.0.0.0/8
| address range which is by default a private network address
| range (i.e. not routable by any other machines). I interpreted
| what the author wrote to say that your machine would be
| assigned an address in 10.2/16 but would still be able to route
| to other AWS services / machines in other 10/8 subnets (e.g.
| 10.1/16)
| benterix wrote:
| > If you had launched an instance in 2006, an m1.small, you would
| have gotten a virtual CPU the equivalent of a 1.7 GHz Xeon
| processor with 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of local disk, and 250
| Mb/second of network bandwidth. And it would have cost just $0.10
| per clocked hour.
|
| > It's quite incredible where cloud computing has gone since
| then, with a P3dn.24xlarge providing 100 Gbps of network
| throughput, 96 vCPUs, 8 NVIDIA v100 Tensor Core GPUs, 32 GiB of
| memory, and 1.8 TB of local SSD storage, not to mention an EFA to
| accelerate ML workloads.
|
| They decided to omit the price but I think it's relatively good -
| around 31 USD per hour. Just remember to turn it off after you're
| done otherwise it will cost you over 7 grand.
| couchand wrote:
| Classic sales maneuver, give numbers but make your numbers as
| incomparable as possible.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I really wish pricing pages included both per-hour and per-
| month (or per-30-days) pricing.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| Ec2 classic was dirt simple. You basically were on a big public
| lan it felt like. If I remember right there were some issues with
| folks running scans / abuse originating inside AWS that felt like
| got a touch slow of a response - then at some point it all
| cleared up? I remember hardening internal systems as if the they
| were public which was a good practice even as vpc arrived. They
| might have gotten a default public ip as well?
|
| I used google app engine which was orphaned (at least version I
| tried) so that was a clear contrast w AWS.
| acdha wrote:
| The public IPs were the big part: if you had the default
| 0.0.0.0/0 rule allowing SSH, you'd see brute force attacks
| within a few seconds of launching a new instance.
|
| VPCs gave a little more room to prevent that but the big thing
| was really better tooling - the average developer still doesn't
| think about security enough to be trusted with the EC2 or GCP
| launch wizard.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| Note my one complaint was that it would have been nice to wrap
| the resource finder script into the gui / web interface
| ydant wrote:
| [parent comment was edited, it originally mentioned SimpleDB]
|
| Speaking of SimpleDB, we still use it. It's amusing how it's
| basically swept under a rug at AWS. It's never mentioned,
| barely documented, but continues to work. It's a pretty good
| product for what it is - a very simple key/value store where
| you don't need/want to manage provisioned throughput, costs,
| keys, etc.
|
| The way they handle SimpleDB makes me respect AWS and feel more
| comfortable on some other services we also rely on that seem
| close to abandoned (like ElasticBeanstalk).
|
| However, as a counter-point, they are killing OpsWorks with
| what feels like a fairly short notice, so I'm also a bit
| cautious about how long they'll maintain services.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| They added Python 3.11 last month. Why do you call it close
| to abandoned?
| ydant wrote:
| Re: ElasticBeanstalk - it's just a feeling, and hopefully
| not correct - it just doesn't feel like it's one of their
| primary focuses, and seems suspiciously stable overall.
| There's nothing I particular want them to add, though, so
| maybe it's "perfect".
|
| I love it, though - it's been a great boon for our small
| team - allowing for a painless hands-off deployment
| strategy that's worked great (largely unchanged) for almost
| a decade.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Ten years ago, during my 2013 keynote at re:Invent, I told you
| that we wanted to "support today's workloads as well as
| tomorrow's," and our commitment to Classic is the best evidence
| of that. It's not lost on me, the amount of work that goes into
| an effort like this -- but it is exactly this type of work that
| builds trust, and I'm proud of the way it has been handled. To
| me, this embodies what it means to be customer obsessed. The EC2
| team kept Classic running (and running well) until every instance
| was shut down or migrated.
|
| This is why businesses trust AWS.
| aranchelk wrote:
| Personally I wish they would have just bit the bullet and
| continued Classic with IPv6.
|
| Ironically I think post-classic was a regression -- it looks a
| lot more like the infrastructure we had to deal with pre-cloud.
|
| My new stuff is mostly on Cloudflare, so now I'm really not
| thinking about subnets, VPCs, etc.
| xxpor wrote:
| It turns out the way to grow the ec2 business is to get
| existing companies into the cloud - not just brand new
| startups. They all have to integrate with on prem networks,
| which necessitates VPC.
| wawwow wrote:
| It's likely a move to reorient their price points. Apparently,
| according to the economist, Amazon Aws is it's sole bread earner.
| htrp wrote:
| > So, I wouldn't blame you if you were wondering what makes an
| EC2 instance "Classic". Put simply, it's the network
| architecture. When we launched EC2 in 2006, it was one giant
| network of 10.2.0.0/8.
|
| And they kept this running for a decade after people agreed there
| were much better options with an announced 2 year sunset period.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I remember being hired for a short consulting gig, and my
| customer asked that the back end be hosted on an EC2 classic
| instance, I think while it was still in beta. The project was a
| simple App running on what I think was some sort of Google TV
| prototype box (it was a long time ago and it was a one or two day
| project so I really don't remember the details).
|
| I used to love AWS but after I worked a while at Google in 2013,
| I switched all my personal projects to GCP for nostalgia (but for
| work, just used whatever platform customers wanted).
| saurik wrote:
| EC2-Classic was magical. It felt like we were finally living in
| the future: a world where software was in charge of networking,
| and all of the legacy cruft that came from having to build
| networks out of cable could be forgotten.
|
| Rather than care about legacy IP "subnets", the cloud cared about
| "security groups", which were missing only a couple features
| (such as "hierarchy") to entirely replace the role of a subnet in
| traditional networking.
|
| Having spent a lot of time working with EC2-Classic, it made
| network engineering fun and easy. The new "VPC" mechanism is
| demoralizing in its complexity, and doesn't seem to allow
| anything you couldn't express using security groups.
|
| I've written about this before--in more detail or with more
| rhetoric, depending on my mood--but the big feeling I get from
| the transition from EC2-Classic was the frustration that comes
| when other people make something worse.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36829190
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33569889
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27990847
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25988915
| jedberg wrote:
| If you create a new account, it will work like classic EC2.
| They will set up the VPC for you behind the scenes. Until you
| "break the glass" and try to configure a VPC, it will work just
| like old classic did.
| icedchai wrote:
| One of the first startups I worked for was all on EC2-Classic.
| I did enjoy its simplicity. I can understand the need for VPC
| when integrating with on-premise networks, VPNs, etc. However,
| you often run into cases where VPC is simply not necessary and
| over complicates things.
| arianvanp wrote:
| They recently launched VPC Lattice.
|
| Which is basically "EC2 Classic networking" but now you pay for
| it
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/lattice/
|
| Though it goes a bit further than just security groups on a
| flat network. Each HTTP endpoint automatically becomes an IAM
| resource and you can treat all our services as if they're
| native to AWS and use the same IAM policies. It's pretty dope!
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