Farewell EC2-Basic, it’s been swell

Retiring companies isn’t one thing we do at AWS. It’s fairly uncommon. Firms depend on our choices – their companies actually stay on these companies – and it’s one thing that we take significantly. 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 announced that we’d be shutting down EC2-Classic, I’m certain that there have been not less than a few of you that didn’t imagine we’d really flip the change — that we’d let it run endlessly. Nicely, that day has come. On August 15, 2023, we shut down the final occasion of Basic. And with the entire historical past right here, I feel 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, nearly 17 years. Solely SQS and S3 are older. So, I wouldn’t blame you should you had been questioning what makes an EC2 occasion “Basic”. Put merely, it’s the community structure. After 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 had been assigned when an occasion was spun up. Basic made the method of buying compute useless easy, regardless that the stack working behind the scenes was extremely complicated. “Invent and Simplify” is without doubt one of the Amazon Leadership Principles in any case…

Should you 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 could have value 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 whole programs 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 “Basic”. And on the time it was actually revolutionary. {Hardware} had turn out to be a programmable useful resource that you could possibly 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 needed, at any time when they needed it. The complexities of managing infrastructure, shopping for new {hardware}, upgrading software program, changing failed disks — had been abstracted away. And it modified the best way 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 Type and the this occasion was adequate to run the server and the native (no RDS but) database. Finally I turned it right into a highly-available service with RDS failover, and so on., and it ran there for five+ years till the Amazon S3 Website feature 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 varied 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 customary. It merely gave clients a brand new stage of management that enabled them to construct much more complete programs within the cloud.

We continued to help Basic for the subsequent decade, at the same time as EC2 advanced and we applied a completely new virtualization platform, Nitro — as a result of our clients had been utilizing it.

Ten years in the past, throughout my 2013 keynote at re:Invent, I advised you that we needed to “help immediately’s workloads in addition to tomorrow’s,” and our dedication to Basic is the very best proof of that. It’s not misplaced on me, the quantity of labor that goes into an effort like this — however it’s precisely the sort of work that builds belief, and I’m pleased with the best way it has been dealt with. To me, this embodies what it means to be buyer obsessed. The EC2 workforce saved Basic working (and working effectively) till each occasion was shut down or migrated. Offering documentation, instruments, and help from engineering and account administration groups all through the method.

It’s bittersweet to say goodbye to one in all our authentic choices. However we’ve come a great distance since 2006 and we’re not completed innovating for our clients. It’s a reminder that constructing evolvable programs is a method, and revisiting your architectures with an open thoughts is a should. So, farewell Basic, it’s been swell. Lengthy stay EC2.

Now, go construct!

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