AWS has recently announced that WorkMail will be discontinued and that App Runner will stop accepting new customers and move into maintenance mode. Several other less popular services and features are also entering maintenance or sunset phases, triggering concern and debate across the AWS community.
App Runner will move to maintenance mode on April 30, although existing users can continue using it, while WorkMail will be shut down in March next year. Several other services and features are also moving to maintenance or sunset stages. While this is part of AWS's lifecycle management, encouraging customers to plan migrations while maintaining continuity for existing workloads, the shift in long-term approach and the number of affected services and features have sparked debate in the community.
The fact that App Runner's deprecation was inadvertently leaked earlier in the year and then retracted, and that a previously deprecated service like CodeCommit was recently resurrected, contributed to some confusion in the community.
According to the announcement, App Runner, Audit Manager, CloudTrail Lake, IoT FleetWise, Glue Ray Jobs, and some less popular features in Amazon Comprehend, Rekognition, SNS, and Application Recovery Controller are moving to maintenance mode and will not accept new customers. At the same time, WorkMail, RDS Custom for Oracle, WorkSpaces Thin Client, and Service Management Connector are entering sunset and will be discontinued. Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, writes in his newsletter:
Roughly 14 services and features (...) getting the Old Yeller treatment in one blog post is a bold move. RDS Custom for Oracle and WorkMail heading to sunset, App Runner going to maintenance - someone finally checked the usage metrics. Pour one out for WorkSpaces Thin Client, a product I'm genuinely surprised lasted this long. Someone owes me a $300 refund for mine. I'm not kidding.
Launched less than three years ago as an "enterprise hardware to provide businesses with easy-to-use virtual desktops," WorkSpaces Thin Client is the only hardware product affected by the announcement. Discussing the WorkMail shutdown on Reddit, user wz2b comments:
Workmail solved some real problems for me that weren't always easy to replicate elsewhere. Like CodeCommit, it let me manage everything more centrally within my AWS environment. (...) I get that these services probably don't drive revenue. What I don't buy is that they were particularly expensive to maintain. To me, they functioned as classic loss leaders - tools that make the broader AWS ecosystem more sticky and convenient. AWS seems to undervalue that concept.
Evaluating alternatives to App Runner, many Reddit users suggest Google Cloud Run, even though AWS recommends ECS Express Mode instead. User timhottens writes:
We ended up deciding to move a service we were building on App Runner to Google Cloud Run. It was fairly simple to set up access to AWS resources using workload identity federation. (...) Cloud Run is head and shoulders above any container offering on AWS, it's actually embarrassing that Amazon doesn't have anything like it.
In the past, SimpleDB was often cited as evidence that AWS did not kill services, even though it was largely obsolete and had been replaced by DynamoDB. A recent article titled "Export Amazon SimpleDB domain data to Amazon S3" suggests that the status of SimpleDB might also change.