Retiring companies isn’t one thing we do at AWS. It’s fairly uncommon. Firms depend on our choices – their companies actually dwell on these companies – and it’s one thing that we take severely. For instance SimpleDB remains to be round, regardless that DynamoDB is the “NoSQL” DB of selection for our clients.
So, two years in the past, when Jeff Barr introduced that we’d be shutting down EC2-Traditional, I’m certain that there have been a minimum of a couple of of you that didn’t imagine we’d really flip the change — that we’d let it run eternally. Effectively, that day has come. On August 15, 2023, we shut down the final occasion of Traditional. And with the entire historical past right here, I believe it’s price celebrating the unique model of one of many companies 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 for those who have been questioning what makes an EC2 occasion “Traditional”. Put merely, it’s the community structure. Once we launched EC2 in 2006, it was one big community of 10.0.0.0/8. All cases ran on a single, flat community shared with different clients. It uncovered a handful of options, like safety teams and Public IP addresses that have been assigned when an occasion was spun up. Traditional made the method of buying compute lifeless easy, regardless that the stack working behind the scenes was extremely complicated. “Invent and Simplify” is likely one of the Amazon Management Ideas 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 might have price simply $0.10 per clocked hour. It’s fairly unimaginable 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 techniques reminiscence, and 1.8 TB of native SSD storage, to not point out an EFA to speed up ML workloads.
However 2006 was a unique time, and that flat community and small assortment of cases, just like the m1.small, was “Traditional”. And on the time it was really revolutionary. {Hardware} had change into a programmable useful resource that you may 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 way in which all of us designed and constructed purposes.
In fact the very first thing I did when EC2 was launched was to maneuver this weblog to an m1.small. It was working Moveable Sort 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 forth., and it ran there for five+ years till the Amazon S3 Web site function was launched in 2011. The weblog has now been “serverless” for the previous 12 years.
Like we do with all of our companies, we listened to what our clients wanted subsequent. This led us to including options like Elastic IP addresses, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, CloudWatch, and numerous 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 grew to become the brand new commonplace. It merely gave clients a brand new degree of management that enabled them to construct much more complete techniques within the cloud.
We continued to assist Traditional for the subsequent decade, at the same time as EC2 advanced and we carried out a completely new virtualization platform, Nitro — as a result of our clients have been utilizing it.
Ten years in the past, throughout my 2013 keynote at re:Invent, I instructed you that we wished to “assist at this time’s workloads in addition to tomorrow’s,” and our dedication to Traditional is the perfect proof of that. It’s not misplaced on me, the quantity of labor that goes into an effort like this — however it’s precisely this sort of work that builds belief, and I’m pleased with the way in which it has been dealt with. To me, this embodies what it means to be buyer obsessed. The EC2 crew stored Traditional working (and working nicely) till each occasion was shut down or migrated. Offering documentation, instruments, and assist from engineering and account administration groups all through the method.
It’s bittersweet to say goodbye to one in every of our authentic choices. However we’ve come a great distance since 2006 and we’re not carried out innovating for our clients. It’s a reminder that constructing evolvable techniques is a method, and revisiting your architectures with an open thoughts is a should. So, farewell Traditional, it’s been swell. Lengthy dwell EC2.
Now, go construct!
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