Farewell EC2-Basic, it’s been swell

Retiring providers isn’t one thing we do at AWS. It’s fairly uncommon. Corporations depend on our choices – their companies actually dwell on these providers – and it’s one thing that we take significantly. For instance SimpleDB remains to be round, despite the fact that DynamoDB is the “NoSQL” DB of alternative for our prospects.

So, two years in the past, when Jeff Barr announced that we’d be shutting down EC2-Classic, I’m certain that there have been at the least a few of you that didn’t imagine we’d really flip the change — that we’d let it run perpetually. Properly, that day has come. On August 15, 2023, we shut down the final occasion of Basic. And with the entire historical past right here, I believe it’s value celebrating the unique model of one of many providers that began what we now know as cloud computing.

EC2 has been round for fairly some time, virtually 17 years. Solely SQS and S3 are older. So, I wouldn’t blame you in case you had been questioning what makes an EC2 occasion “Basic”. Put merely, it’s the community structure. After we launched EC2 in 2006, it was one big community of 10.0.0.0/8. All situations ran on a single, flat community shared with different prospects. It uncovered a handful of options, like safety teams and Public IP addresses that had been assigned when an occasion was spun up. Basic made the method of buying compute lifeless easy, despite the fact that the stack operating behind the scenes was extremely advanced. “Invent and Simplify” is without doubt one of the Amazon Leadership Principles in spite of everything…

For those who had launched an occasion in 2006, an m1.small, you’ll have gotten a digital CPU the equal of a 1.7 GHz Xeon processor with 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of native disk, and 250 Mb/second of community bandwidth. And it will have value simply $0.10 per clocked hour. It’s fairly unbelievable the place cloud computing has gone since then, with a P3dn.24xlarge offering 100 Gbps of community throughput, 96 vCPUs, 8 NVIDIA v100 Tensor Core GPUs with 32 GiB of reminiscence every, 768 GiB of complete programs reminiscence, and 1.8 TB of native SSD storage, to not point out an EFA to speed up ML workloads.

However 2006 was a special time, and that flat community and small assortment of situations, just like the m1.small, was “Basic”. And on the time it was really revolutionary. {Hardware} had turn out to be a programmable useful resource that you possibly can scale up or down at a second’s discover. Each developer, entrepreneur, startup and enterprise, now had entry to as a lot compute as they wished, every time they wished it. The complexities of managing infrastructure, shopping for new {hardware}, upgrading software program, changing failed disks — had been abstracted away. And it modified the best way all of us designed and constructed purposes.

After all the very first thing I did when EC2 was launched was to maneuver this weblog to an m1.small. It was operating Moveable Type and the this occasion was ok to run the server and the native (no RDS but) database. Ultimately I turned it right into a highly-available service with RDS failover, and so on., and it ran there for five+ years till the Amazon S3 Website feature was launched in 2011. The weblog has now been “serverless” for the previous 12 years.

Like we do with all of our providers, we listened to what our prospects wanted subsequent. This led us to including options like Elastic IP addresses, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, CloudWatch, and varied new occasion sorts that might higher go well with totally different workloads. By 2013 we had enabled VPC, which allowed every AWS buyer to handle their very own slice of the cloud, safe, remoted, and outlined for his or her enterprise. And it turned the brand new normal. It merely gave prospects a brand new stage of management that enabled them to construct much more complete programs within the cloud.

We continued to help Basic for the following decade, at the same time as EC2 developed and we applied a wholly new virtualization platform, Nitro — as a result of our prospects had been utilizing it.

Ten years in the past, throughout my 2013 keynote at re:Invent, I advised you that we wished to “help as we speak’s workloads in addition to tomorrow’s,” and our dedication to Basic is the very best proof of that. It’s not misplaced on me, the quantity of labor that goes into an effort like this — however it’s precisely one of these work that builds belief, and I’m pleased with the best way it has been dealt with. To me, this embodies what it means to be buyer obsessed. The EC2 group stored Basic operating (and operating effectively) till each occasion was shut down or migrated. Offering documentation, instruments, and help from engineering and account administration groups all through the method.

It’s bittersweet to say goodbye to one among our authentic choices. However we’ve come a good distance since 2006 and we’re not executed innovating for our prospects. It’s a reminder that constructing evolvable programs is a method, and revisiting your architectures with an open thoughts is a should. So, farewell Basic, it’s been swell. Lengthy dwell EC2.

Now, go construct!

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