Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

With so many new AWS features rolling out, I am worried that Amazon is spreading themselves too thin and will soon decide to stop supporting some of their less-popular services that I happen to be using.

As far as I can tell, there is no guarantee anywhere that they'll maintain any service for any length of time.

If that happens, it could waste weeks or months of engineering time trying to migrate to something else, or I'll just have to shut down my own services if I decide it's not worth migrating.

View on HN

I am not too concerned about this – though I do think it's a valid concern considering the actions of other players in the space.

Sitting here in Seattle I see Amazon hoovering up all the local talent they can hire. And I see them putting up new tower after new tower to house them. I don't worry about them stretching themselves too thin as far as manpower goes.

And they don't have a history of closing down AWS products – for instance the first, (and not a runaway hit) Mechanical Turk is still with us.

Mturk is heavily used internally and in academia for a crazy variety of stuff. It's not S3, but it's hugely important for the people it serves; it would be incredibly foolish to shut it down.

It's a valid concern. AWS has been around for many years now with numerous services. Has there been a single offering which they retired or stopped supporting? I'm not aware of one.

Amazon doesn't just create services, throws them over the wall and see if they stick. Rather, they almost always RESPOND to customer requests. Dr. Werner Vogels, AWS's CTO makes a point about that approach at about any keynote he gives. Similarly, they try to also avoid feature creep by only providing features which customers really ask for.

SimpleDB is the closest I believe. It's still around if you are using it, but it isn't in the web console anymore.

I am unaware of AWS modules discontinued by amazon, but it is also true that the oldest services are the most popular (S3, EC2) while some of the most recent ones have a (apparently?) smaller user base (SWF, Kinesis, AppStream).

I think I remember amazon people saying they are actually dogfooding this stuff so it should stay available for a long time anyway, rather than being a random Google Reader.

There is a strong culture of dog-fooding in Amazon. The advantages to it are quite straight forward :) If you've got a whole bunch of DBA experts already hired, why would you hire additional people to do DBA work for every team, when they could just use RDS? Along with that is the huge added benefit of a direct feedback loop, with consumers and producers able to directly meet and deal with feature requests, problems etc. etc.

Retiring any of the services that have been launched would cause not inconsiderable pain to other teams :)

AWS's practice of charging people seems to make it pretty easy to justify not pulling a Google on users.

AWS definitely dogfoods, to the point where people have to be careful internally to not create circular dependencies (this nearly happened to me once).

I think there's a notion of persistence in AWS' leadership that propagates through the teams. AWS is willing to fight through the early painful years for products to see them arrive at the stage that EC2/S3 have attained.

Sounds like it saved you a lot of time getting your app up and running and I'm assuming they would give you a lot of time to migrate before just shutting it down. I wouldn't worry about this, however, this is something to consider any time you use a 3rd party to manage a service for you. I've had issues with fully managed RackSpace servers where the OS hit its EOL and it was on me to migrate everything to a new server. I've had this issue with fully managed database providers when they migrated to a new infrastructure and I had to move my data into a new database. There are other examples but most of them are pretty minor and none of them were too big of a deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com