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.
Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
31–40 of 187 posts
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#32> 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?
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.
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#33Ec2 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.
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#34So 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…
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.
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#35I 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).
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#36So 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…
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 th…
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.
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#37Ec2 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 i…
Note my one complaint was that it would have been nice to wrap the resource finder script into the gui / web interface
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#38Ec2 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 i…
[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.
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
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.
Re: Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
#40I 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?