https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA
It'll tell you lots about how AWS is built
I know Amazon went the route of building their own smart NICs with both network and IO capabilities early (The same thing Nvidia is doing and calling revolutionary since last year)
They rack more servers per day than I could afford in a lifetime.
Full exact technical details aren't shared, but there are some videos on Youtube which touch on it their customized x86 and ARM server racks:
Amazon has deprecated several things, they tend not to actually retire them (just reduce thei public profile so people aren't tempted to build new instances, while supporting the existing users indefinitely.)
By default. You could still request it to be enabled on your account by contacting support.
I think the only other service that was ever deprecated was SimpleDB, which was replaced with DynamoDB.
So yeah, you're right, it's still there.
Amazon has deprecated and then put to the grave multiple payment services. Torrent support in S3 is being killed off with little notice.
Did anyone ever seriously use it? It never made much sense to me -- if you're trying to optimize for performance, S3 is already pretty good and a CDN can make that even better; if you're trying to optimize for cost, you wouldn't be using S3 in the first place.
1) Universal torrent support is prerequisite to broad adoption. Having S3 be part of that network is nice.
2) It gives a fallback to exploding costs if something I do goes viral. I have the option of a weekend hackathon.
... and so on.
It's one of those features I like even if I don't use.
(And no, that's not actually common of features -- most of AWS, I wouldn't mind if it was not there)
There were only a few instance types, and they were all slow and small (by todays standards). Everyone's EC2 instances were mostly publicly pingable/ssh-able from the internet. EBS was horribly horribly slow (our DBAs set up a super convoluted RAID 0+1 configuration for our MySQL databases and even then we needed massive sharding to keep up with growth). EC2 instances were, in general, very unreliable (I recall something like 1 in 500 instances failing _per week_), and especially so in the leadup to Christmas (where the rumor was AWS kept the best instances for themselves).
This is pretty much the first time I've heard of AWS really deprecating something, so I have a feeling it will _hugely_ simplify things on their end. From reading the post I also get the idea that it won't be _that_ hard of an operation from their side. I bet few people (by AWS standards) are still using EC2 classic heavily.