Disruption Ahead: AWS Quietly Axing Services
Amazon is quietly deprecating Cloud9, SimpleDB, CodeCommit and more services.
It started with users reporting that CodeCommit, Cloud9 and other services have become blocked for new users.
Then Jeff Barr, AWS’s Chief Evangelist, tweeted on X (Twitter) a brief note that “we made the decision to discontinue new access to a small number of services, including AWS CodeCommit”.
Jeff Barr’s tweet did not name any other service besides CodeCommit, and didn’t provide more details or a link for an announcement or docs on this.
Following questions on the thread, Barr replied with the deprecated AWS services he was referring to: “S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, and CodeCommit.”
Are these the only services in this wave of service deprecations? Not quite. Other services have been put on the chopping board in the past couple months, including Snowmobile, Workdocs (document sharing), OpsWorks elements for DevOps, and Finspace for financial services, according to SummitRoute’s aws_breaking_changes tracker.
This is quite a blow to many AWS users, as well as partners who’ve been steered towards these services. But AWS has been experimenting with services and deprecating them since it started. So what’s new?
There’s something bigger here. It seems AWS has come to an important realization. Perhaps a realization that should hit all of us.
The one-stop-cloud-shop approach has failed. AWS can’t be everything to everyone. AWS has done a fine job on infrastructure as a service, but there’s a long way from infra to dev.
Dev itself isn’t even a single thing. Backend, frontend, mobile, IoT or Web3 are specialized areas, let alone industry-specific like financial services or healthcare. One vendor cannot specialize and excel at all, no matter how big this corp is. These are different personae.
Take Cloud9 as an example. It was a cool startup with a cool web IDE (integrated developer environmentׁ) that lets developers write, run, and debug their application code in the browser. It was a great tool, I got to put up nice customer workshops with it. Amazon bought it to counter Google and Microsoft in their dev tooling race. But AWS was not the right home for it. It’s not their specialty.
This realization will hopefully help AWS refocus on what it does best in the infrastructure, and invest more in its technical alliances and partners ecosystem to integrate value added services from specialized vendors. This is the right approach to reach quality developer experience, as well as that of the DevOps, SRE, SysAdmin, Data Scientist and other personae.
