In the upcoming months, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will put down one of its cloud computing infrastructure services, EC2-Classic, and warn other users to move off the service to eliminate the application downtime.

EC2-Classic came with the original release of Amazon EC2. Still, it was not supported for accounts created after April 2013, at which point it required users to launch EC2 instances in a place called virtual private cloud (VPC) – a logically separated section AWS.

With EC2-Classic, some instances run in a single flat network which is shared with other customers. EC2-Classic appealed to public IP addresses made available at the time, or tunneling, to communicate with AWS resources in a VPC.

Some deadlines are coming up for any business on EC2-Classic; however, Barr says that the process will be slow.

The main dates to keep in mind are August 15, 2022, and October 30, 2021.

On October 30, AWS will disable EC2-Classic in Regions for AWS accounts with no active EC2-Classic resources in the region. On the same date, AWS won’t sell 1-year and 3-year reserved cases for EC2-Classic.

By August 15, AWS reckons all migrations will be done and that all EC2-Classic resources will have been destroyed from the AWS accounts.

EC2-Classic customers will keep an eye on crucial AWS resources include:

  • Redshift clusters
  • Elastic Beanstalk environment
  • ElastiCache clusters
  • Spot requests
  • Elastic IP addresses
  • Capacity reservations
  • EMR clusters
  • Running or stopped EC2 instances
  • Classic load balancers
  • Reserved instances

Considering the difficulty of finding all services dependent on EC2-Class resources, AWS has released the EC2 Classic Resource Finder script to help EC2-Classic resources in one account. It also offers AWS Application Manager Service to help customers shift instances and databases from EC2-Classic to VPC.

What leaders have to say

“EC2-Classic has served us well, but we’re going to give it a gold watch and a well-deserved sendoff,” writes AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr.

“Rest assured that we are going to make this as smooth and as non-disruptive as possible. We are not planning to disrupt any workloads and we are giving you plenty of lead time so that you can plan, test, and perform your migration,” Barr notes.

Barr also says that users can contact AWS Support if they ever need to re-enable EC2-Classic for a particular region.