[HN Gopher] AWS deprecates two dozen services (most of which you...
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AWS deprecates two dozen services (most of which you've never heard
of)
Author : mooreds
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-11-15 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lastweekinaws.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lastweekinaws.com)
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| language rant: titles with assertions that "you" have or have not
| $whatever...they seem lazily worded.
| devin wrote:
| Why do you think they're "lazy"? The point is usually to bait
| you: "You'll never guess this one weird trick!"
|
| Here it actually makes some sense. There are _so_ many AWS
| services. It's similar to the quiz about AWS service icons that
| demonstrated that not only are the icons broadly unknown, there
| are myriad unknown services which further complicates things.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| bait is definitely a better description, though i still think
| bait could be more effectively worded.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Man, deprecating an IoT APIs isn't going to affect most folks,
| but the folks it does affect are gonna be in a fuckload of
| trouble.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| It says existing customers can continue to use the IoT apis,
| just not new customers.
| Aurornis wrote:
| AWS has been good at leaving deprecated services running for
| existing customers for a long time. They're doing that here.
|
| They're deprecating it for new use cases.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Wasn't there a big post about this a few weeks ago?
| topher200 wrote:
| This article is from mid-October.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| Thanks, but the date is at the top of the article.
| learned wrote:
| CodeCatalyst is pretty surprising on that list. Maybe it tried to
| do too much?
|
| Also, the deprecation alert on the CodeCatalyst site is incorrect
| at the moment:
|
| > Important Notice: Amazon CodeCatalyst is longer open to new
| customers starting on November 7, 2025
|
| https://codecatalyst.aws/explore
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| In my experience, any time AWS tries to create a service
| outside of the primitives, it's a mess.
| tyre wrote:
| I'm guessing it's just harder to dogfood in a way that others
| can use without all of the other internal-only infra
| (including dev tooling) available internally. And to get to
| the point where you could dogfood at AWS scale, anything
| that's difficult to adopt incrementally is going to be a
| pain.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Exactly, no one internally is going to use something like
| Amplify or Code Catalyst. That's like internal developers
| didn't use CodeCommit (AWS's now deprecated Git service).
|
| Even though it did hurt me when they got rid of CodeCommit.
| I work in consulting and I always ask for my own isolated
| dev AWS account in their organization with basically admin
| access. It was nice to just be able to put everything in
| CodeCommit without dealing with trying to be a part of
| their GitHub organization if their was red tape.
|
| I miss Cloud 9 too. I didn't have to bother with making
| sure their computers were setup with all of the pre
| requisites and it gave me a known environment for the
| handover
| hinkley wrote:
| Does the service list fit on a 4k monitor with these removed?
| sunrunner wrote:
| Horizontal or vertical orientation?
| hinkley wrote:
| It's been a while since I was dumb enough to try to use the
| menu system. What a useless sea of unhelpful product names
| and icons.
|
| Doesn't it adjust? But in any case, does it fit in any
| orientation at all?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| AWS has so many services at this point and it feels like so many
| of them overlap too. Seems like for a while they basically just
| took any open source project that was somewhat popular and
| offered a managed version of it. Plus there is a marketplace
| where others can offer services. The landscape is so vast it
| feels overwhelming to even try to get a basic layout.
|
| For personal projects I end up avoiding AWS and instead prefer
| things like the Backblaze S3-compatible object storage, Vultr for
| VMs, and so on just to avoid the power user features that will
| only get in the way.
|
| With that, I am curious how people who do not have an enterprise-
| size team to manage their AWS infrastructure navigate their
| offerings.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I always find the idea that there's something to navigate kind
| of curious - as you say, its lots of managed versions of open
| source tools and a mix of proprietary management frameworks on
| top. Some of what they offer are genuinely unique products for
| niche use cases, but if you have that niche you probably know
| what services can support it, like the people in the other
| comments here mentioning the IoT APIs.
|
| But me (or my teams) are rarely asking the question of "how
| should I run my service on AWS" in general, its much more
| typically "I need a managed Postgres database, what AWS product
| offers that" or "I have an OCI image, what managed platform can
| I run that in" or even "I want this endpoint to be available
| all the time, but its usage is very unpredictable/intermittent,
| so I don't want to pay for idle compute". There might still be
| a couple of possible answers for those questions, but by the
| point I arrive there I'm solving for a specific problem.
|
| Its sort of like walking into a kitchen hungry and seeing 3
| knives and a stove and oven and a dozen peelers and can openers
| etc etc and being very overwhelmed by all of this (do I need
| the knife with a smooth edge or the serrated one?) until you
| decide you want to eat a grilled cheese, and then grabbing a
| skillet to put onto a burner and everything making sense once
| you actually start to cook a specific thing.
| tyre wrote:
| They've gotten much better at streamlining setup and
| suggesting sane defaults over the years. I hear the GP that
| there soooo many knobs. I've found that AWS does a pretty
| good job, like in the postgres compatible RDS case, of
| suggesting defaults that make sense for most people. And when
| you run into issues / scaling problems, you can Claude your
| way to which settings to research.
|
| The only one that still drives me insane is IAM. That product
| makes me feel dumb every time I use it, even for simple use
| cases like "I want a managed redis compatible instance that
| can only be accessed by these resources." The groups and
| users and roles and VPCs have never felt intuitive to me,
| despite having a clear idea of what I want the end state to
| be.
| pram wrote:
| From my observations over the years a lot of "services" should
| literally just be features in stuff that already exists. Like
| Flink should have just been under MSK instead of the confusing
| mess it has gone through (first branded as part of Kinesis???)
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| In that case, you can still just use AWS Lightsail. It's a
| simple service where you just spin up an EC2 and pay one price
| for VPC and an allotment of outbound data (inbound is free).
| You never have to worry about costs going out of control, VPCs,
| networking etc.
|
| When you do need to graduate to real AWS, you can and your
| former Lightsale set up is treated like a VPC you can peer to.
| sgarland wrote:
| Except for the DB. The official way to migrate from a
| Lightsail DB to RDS is to do a logical dump and restore.
|
| For MySQL, or if you have a monotonic column in Postgres,
| that _might_ be doable if you dumped in parallel, but
| otherwise it's an unacceptable amount of downtime when you
| reach the limits of Lightsail.
|
| It is baffling to me that AWS doesn't offer a one-click
| option to B/G from Lightsail --> RDS, as that's a very
| reasonable growth pattern for many startups.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| If it is already in a DB, why wouldn't that be treated as
| just a DB in the now peered Lightsail VPC?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > enterprise-size team to manage their AWS infrastructure
| navigate their offerings.
|
| You don't. You start with a problem and find solutions, not
| navigate solutions to make problems for. And even the worst AWS
| service I interacted has world class documentation and support.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"You start with a problem and find solutions, not navigate
| solutions to make problems for."_
|
| Ideally. But that's often not how corporate IT works.
| mooreds wrote:
| > For personal projects I end up avoiding AWS and instead
| prefer things like the Backblaze S3-compatible object storage,
| Vultr for VMs, and so on just to avoid the power user features
| that will only get in the way.
|
| The author wrote an article about this too:
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/04/aws_genz_misery_nope/
|
| > With that, I am curious how people who do not have an
| enterprise-size team to manage their AWS infrastructure
| navigate their offerings.
|
| I've been a startup CTO that used selected AWS infra (s3
| buckets, RDS) along with an easier PaaS solution (Heroku, in my
| case). So I think the answer to your question is: using some of
| the managed services, which are rock solid, and using easier
| solutions for compute or some of the more complex AWS services.
|
| I know folks who started similarly, but then moved to AWS fully
| when it made business sense (in one case, because of HIPAA
| regulations and the cost difference between AWS and Heroku for
| the BAA).
| dehrmann wrote:
| The problem is these small customers never drive enough sales
| to bother with--you're better off investing in a feature for
| a large customer. And by the time small customers get large
| enough to need things like complex permissioning, they've
| outgrown Heroku and will be onboarding anyway. Giving
| startups credits really might be the most effective way to
| handle rough edges for small shops.
|
| As a startup, I'd probably bite the bullet of one-time setup
| pain for a database, blob store, load balancer, and service
| hosting at a major cloud provider because those systems will
| be rock-solid with well-understood APIs. Full disclosure: I
| work for a major cloud provider.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I used Backblaze and strongly regretted it.
|
| Wonky bandwidth limits and throttling are my main problem,
| but also had some issues with login at one point which
| apparently wasn't unique to me. Would never trust it for
| anything mission critical after that.
|
| The nice thing about S3 is even if you screw up your usage
| patterns, you can pay/engineer your way out guaranteed. You
| can slurp up as much data as you want as often as you want
| and it may not be cheap, but it will work and it can be made
| extremely fast.
|
| I'm coming to find that's not universal for these S3
| compatible services. Really scary to build a business knowing
| that.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"AWS has so many services at this point and it feels like so
| many of them overlap too."_
|
| Yep. I've also always found it frustrating how so many of them
| have names like "Snowball", "Kenesis", "Beanstalk", "Fargate",
| "Aurora", etc, which don't give you any real clue what they do.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Route 53 is one of the few intuitively named services they
| offer.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion (69 points, 1 month ago, 35 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572613
| Ayesh wrote:
| Thank you. The linked third party article is a terrible
| incomplete rehash.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I mean, I liked the explanation of what the services were,
| and why I should care, versus just a simple list...
| cperciva wrote:
| _AWS has done its quarterly housecleaning / "Googling" of its
| services_
|
| Note: This is actually two quarters of Googling, because they
| were revising their process during Q3 and put deprecations on
| hold.
| more_corn wrote:
| Elastic beanstalk or GTFO
| odie5533 wrote:
| I think they accidentally convinced too many people to use it
| and now they can't get rid of it.
| rs186 wrote:
| Anyone can predict what's going to happen with Amazon Q?
|
| The only people that I know or have seen using Amazon Q are
| internal employees. Almost nothing on reddit.
| easton wrote:
| It's definitely fine for a while, it's the closest thing they
| have to an internal chatbot product and they need that to sell
| enterprises on adopting AWS.
| righthand wrote:
| Anecdotally, I tried using Amazon Q when trying to generate
| configs and get questions answered for Aws ses configs. However
| even though: the icon was on my screen and fully functioning
| and I could enter a question, I could not send the question or
| use it because my admin had not granted my dev profile access
| to use Amazon Q.
|
| And my guess is that people have that same experience and give
| up. Because the admin permissions are probably stored in a yaml
| config somewhere and it will require a meeting with a devops
| admin and ultimately be a huge waste of time for answering 1-2
| questions.
| dherls wrote:
| I like how the article uses "Googling" as a verb meaning to shut
| down a service
| oytis wrote:
| Thank you, I failed to understand what he means.
| yreg wrote:
| Reminds me of the '168 AWS Services in 2 minutes' song
|
| https://youtu.be/BtJAsvJOlhM
| wdb wrote:
| Ah good old IoT Greengrass and Lambda that made me fail a job
| interview as it was my only AWS experience and the interviewers
| didn't belief it existed.
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