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Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

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Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#21
post #14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

> It's just that migraine away from it means migrating, period.

Freudian slip?

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember those days, there was no database layer at AWS so we used instances with Elastic Block store for durability.

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...

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.

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#23
post #18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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.

Can you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#24
post #14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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)

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#25
post #18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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.

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.

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#26

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 cust…

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.

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#27
post #4

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?)…

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

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#29
post #23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?

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.

Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

#30
post #4

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?)…

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

Sounds to me like a rug pull is imminent
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