21 More AWS Services They Should Cancel

+1 on NAT Gateway. For those unaware, you need to setup a NAT gateway for your tools inside of a VPC to access the internet. I forget the pricing, but it's way more expensive than it should be and it's a huge pain to setup. This is a service that is annoyingly expensive for hobbyists/indie-devs/people just playing around, but a rounding error for AWS's "real" customers. Just build it into VPC (a checkbox that says "I would like to be able to access the internet from my code in the VPC") and make it free or at least have upfront pricing.

One of my services is still running on Elastic Beanstalk. There&#x27;s a lot of pros, but the cons are starting to build up, especially since it&#x27;s relatively easy to port stuff to Elastic Container Service. I&#x27;m in the process of doing that now.<p>EB was great at the beginning, but as the number of connections to other AWS and third party providers increased, it has become incredibly clunky to tweak the build files. What&#x27;s even worse is that when something does go wrong -- which it inevitably will -- it&#x27;s extremely hard and slow to debug exactly what went wrong.<p>Using it with celery has also been rough.<p>All of that being said I&#x27;m ambivalent about having EB on this list. I think it&#x27;s a good product that has languished partially due to three reasons:<p>1. AWS having too many overlapping tools (AppRunner, Lightsail, ECS, etc.) 2. AWS haven&#x27;t added or prioritized as many new features on EB for years 3. The devOps tooling is much more mature these days.

You&#x27;ll have to pry CDK out of my cold, dead hands.

I love that NAT gateway and Cloudformation+CDK+Proton are on this list. I&#x27;ve spent the last 3 years building with these tools, and these are some of the most frustrating things in our stack. Our NAT gateway costs are gross. We pay to have the ability to send traffic, but we don&#x27;t use it enough for that price. Meanwhile, CDK hid the awkwardness of Cloudformation from us for awhile, now we&#x27;re too tangled to easily leave it.

Most of these sure.<p>Workmail is a weird choice, I mean its just fine as an email system so why cut it? Plus migrating email hosts is kinda a pain. I use it for my personal&#x2F;professional email and, I never interact with Workmail directly since its on my phone.<p>Lightsail, it sounds like the primary reason is that it won&#x27;t make money on its own but I figured that was never it&#x27;s purpose. It always seemed like Lightsail existed to get people into AWS for smaller projects.<p>Cloudformation I strongly disagree with. I use it for all infrastructure and having used terraform in the past I much prefer it. My only real problem with CF is that it is not required that all new features are part of CF when they launch. That fixes CF but doesn&#x27;t need a replacement to make it work. Throw in some UI improvements, but no reason to throw it out.

When I saw Nat Gateway and Cloudformation, I feel like OP should switch to DigitalOcean or Linode for the simpler stacks. AWS is not for custom solutions. Without Cloudformation, how do you manage your stacks? Terraform is third party and now getting complicated with the license.

<i>Edit</i> Nevermind it’s just me. Should have checked my extensions first.<p>FYI to the author, there’s a curious bug with using the back button on iPhone&#x2F;safari.<p>If from this thread I click the link to go to your page, and before doing anything hit the “back” button, this works fine.<p>If I go to your page, and then scroll to the bottom, and then hit back (like I did after reading the article), safari seems unable to do so, staying on the page and appearing to get caught in a loop with a growing list of history links to the same page. I think something about the jump links is confusing safari. I do have various extensions installed in safari, so if no one else has this issue it may just be me.<p>This does not happen in the iPhone&#x2F;orion browser, which function fine.

How about evolving CloudFormation and CDK instead of trashing it and starting over.<p>The CF web interface does not do a great job of showing the hierarchy and relationships between resources.<p>And working around circular dependency issues in CDK can be a real time sink.

Just signed up to say that I&#x27;m an AWS Certified Solution Architect and I&#x27;ve used none of them in production and don&#x27;t even know what most of them are.<p>And no we don&#x27;t use CDK or CloudFormation!

&gt; and App Runner so unsuccessful,<p>Is App Runner not doing well? I&#x27;ve been using it and it seems... well not great, but I am surprised that it&#x27;s not at least trending upwards.

I knew someone a while back who worshipped the ground AWS stepped on, and thought CloudFormation and CDK was the best thing since sliced bread.<p>I honestly couldn’t see where they were coming from. CF is awful to work with, even more awful when you have to recover from a failed deploy or rollback, and hacking declarative concepts into Typescript for CDK is just a maintenance disaster in the waiting.<p>I don’t know why you would choose any of those over Terraform or equivalent declarative IaC tools unless you are a die hard AWS fanatic or simply had the misfortune of inheriting the stack.

How good is AWS at a) communicating impending deprecations and b) providing lead time to migrate off deprecated services?

What do you propose to replace CloudFormation with, especially since you’ve gone scorched earth on the related products?

What services would you get rid of?

Agree with all of those