But if you are using a (costly) managed service it's because you don't want the hurdle of managing the service. Migrating off something is instead probably the most time consuming thing in a service lifecycle. So, even if it is normal to sunset products and people deal with it all the time, it's still a big PITA if you are affected.
On the other hand part of the trade offs of using such services is that you have no control of when they will become unavailable. Its not just normal, its expected.
AFAIK cloud9 was never vscode based, it was a dutch startup acquisition when hosted RDEs were looking popular https://siliconcanals.com/amazon-acquires-cloud9/. I believe theyre busy working on similar-but-not-obviously related remote environments like AWS Workspaces.
Re: existing Code-asterisk _services_ see CodeCatalyst at a recent (in progress) attempt to move to a more unified user-centric _product_.
And for downthread Cognito, Id be surprised if it ever goes away. i think theres some unification/deconfliction of capabilities that needs to happen with Federate. But Id expect one or both of those to stick around as a proxy pool of user identities for apps. The more interesting, and huge change to how AWS fundamentally works, is Identity Center(IdC). Tying back to cognito and CodeCatalyst IdC should _finally_ bring user identities, and your corp IdP, in to AWS and actually be useful across existing services. This _could_ catch AWS up to goog cloud and OCI and (I assume) azure on identity management.
Edit: ex AWS, but all if the above based on publicly available information.
This is discounting most operations/operational support, as you cant practically scale on oncall rota that small and your example is probably referring to a small customer base and a very infrastructure light service. You _could_ move that to a cheaper dev center & more shared ops, but that in itself is a lot of work.
2. Theres a lot of overlap between these services. Its often not complete, and theyll have different approaches. But fundamentally Amazons distributed nature means multiple orgs will solve similar problems that are adjacent but outside their focus, and then realize that “product” is someones elses better owned feature. Culling needs tk happen at that user experience level sooner or later. The linked blog post is a good example.
3. “Pay the average cost” is going to be shocking to see how much some of these cost to run. This cost increase is going to feel like extortion for customers who _already use other service_ and probably pay a lot more. Earning ongoing negative feedback over a minor service is not worth it. Nearly all services are priced based on a multi year forward looking marginal cost model. I would very much expect the average cost to be 10x the customer price for a small service like app mesh that never “reached scale” or got their P&L together. Then add in those dev salaries I mentioned.
Most importantly those ktlo dev hours in point #1 are an opportunity cost for AWS. They should be spent on new revenue generating work, not cost reduction, and certajnly not a dead end. More than 10 years ago the rough rule of thumb was that a dev year of work should be targeting $12M/yr in revenue generation. I know we didnt consistently hit that, but thats the kind of benchmark that would be used to evaluate staffing. In AWS today if the overall product doesnt have a line of sight to $500M its not a viable innestment.
Source: former AWS employee
If they really have staffing problems, it'd make sense in the short-term to shut down services which don't bring in much revenue. In the long-term that might fire back if AWS customers loose trust in the services they're using still being there in the future.
The obvious solution to a possible staffing problem would of course be not fire a certain percentage of your employees every year.
They’ve given nearly 2 years notice here (more than double what a lot of other SaaS providers offer) and there will be an army of AWS engineers available to help customers migrate too.
AWS do actually discontinue services all the time. It just doesn’t make the headlines because their depreciation process is so good.
Now, if you wanted to discuss their billing, difficultly to navigating the literally thousands of products they offer, contradicting documentation, half baked implementations, cryptic error messages (assuming you’re even lucky enough to get an error) when deployments fail, or the dozen other hurdles that make using AWS a highly paid specialty, then I’d agree with you. But depreciation of services is one of their strengths.
Where are they going to go to get higher guarantees of services not being abandoned? Google?
> The obvious solution to a possible staffing problem would of course be not fire a certain percentage of your employees every year.
Have you worked for a BigTech company and seen their promo doc? No developer would want to work on a dead end service who was interested in their career.
I'm sure with the excellent work life balance, supportive atmosphere, nurturing organization, and upbeat attitude, Amazon's staffing issues are just a short blip.
One thing Amazon is known for us a good place for a long term stable career!
It's a good thing that organizations employment is so stable with so many foundational services that so much of our economy depends upon.
