Werner Vogels, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of AWS, has announced the closure of the EC2-Classic service, which has been in use since the introduction of EC2 in 2006, a remarkable 17 years ago. AWS has quietly shut down these instances as of August 15, 2023, but has only recently made the announcement public.
AWS revealed its plan to close down EC2-Classic machines starting in August 2021, providing a two-year advance notice. These instances stopped being available for new customers since 2013, but existing customers have been able to continue using them.
EC2, one of the earliest services by AWS, was preceded by just two services: Amazon SQS, launched in 2004 (which was not initially considered a cloud service), and S3, introduced in 2006, just a few months before EC2.
Vogels mentioned that he personally switched his private blog to run on an m1.small instance as soon as EC2 was launched. Inside the instance was a software called Movable Type and a built-in database, as AWS did not have the RDS database service at that time. He ran this blog setup for five years until AWS introduced the Amazon S3 Website hosting service in 2011, which he then moved his blog onto.
TLDR: AWS has announced the closure of the EC2-Classic service after 17 years of operation. Existing customers can continue using these instances until August 15, 2023. The two-year advance notice was provided to allow customers to plan accordingly. Werner Vogels, the CTO of AWS, shared his personal experience of running a blog on EC2 during its early years.
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