AWS CodeCommit, Cloud9 closure communication critiqued
AWS CodeCommit gives up the Git ghost to competitors, while a lack of advance notice to users has some IT pros questioning the future of other services.
AWS CodeCommit and six other Amazon Web Services stopped allowing the creation of new accounts this week without advance warning, prompting some industry observers to question the future of other infrequently updated AWS products.
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr acknowledged the changes in a post on X July 30, and confirmed the company is no longer accepting new customers for AWS CodeCommit, the cloud provider's hosted Git code repository; its S3 Select SQL query feature; the Amazon CloudSearch managed search service; Cloud9 IDE; the SimpleDB database service; the Amazon Forecast time-series data analytics service; and AWS Data Pipeline.
Existing customers will still be supported, Barr said, and the company does not currently plan to shut down the services, but it will not add new features and will support migration to competitors' Git repositories.
Barr also acknowledged that AWS had not clearly communicated the changes.
"We are making improvements so this is clearer for customers," he wrote.
After giving it a lot of thought, we made the decision to discontinue new access to a small number of services, including AWS CodeCommit.
While we are no longer onboarding new customers to these services, there are no plans to change the features or experience you get today,…
Still, the news prompted further questions, such as how creating new S3 Select accounts, which is a feature of the broadly used S3 object store, will be discontinued. Other replies to Barr continued to critique the lack of notice to customers and partners. One published report this week indicated even some AWS salespeople learned of the changes through Barr's post, rather than internal communications.
"Whether I'm looking at this as a consumer/solutions architect or trainer... this is customer hostile behavior," wrote AWS technical trainer Adrian Cantrill in a reply to Barr on X.
Another AWS user asked whether similar changes would come to other services that haven't seen recent major updates, such as Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate and AWS App Mesh.
"I use them but plan to get off them," Campbell McNeill, lead DevOps engineer at USAA, told TechTarget Editorial about those two services this week. "There has been no love on them for years and zero mentions at re:Invent, so you can read between the lines."
McNeill said he won't wait to move away from Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate, an automated provisioning service for Kubernetes clusters that he said is likely to be replaced by open source project Karpenter.
"It's for the best in my book," he said. "[Amazon EKS on AWS] Fargate is simple but limited. [It] isn't offering things like Graviton CPU [support] which I would expect if it had a future."
McNeill said he hadn't used AWS CodeCommit but noted it was required in AWS certification tests he took in December and February.
"It kind of burns a bit that you do work to learn it to get certified, then it gets canned," he said.
Competitor concession prompts strategy doubts
For some developers, the writing is clearly on the wall for AWS CodeCommit, especially as AWS facilitates migration to competitors' services.
If I were on AWS CodeCommit, I'd already be looking for an alternative.
Rob ZazuetaFreelance consultant
"If I were on AWS CodeCommit, I'd already be looking for an alternative," said Rob Zazueta, a freelance technical consultant in Concord, Calif. "If AWS is no longer accepting new users, they'll likely cut it loose at some point in the future."
Some industry observers were unsurprised that AWS CodeCommit was among the services de-emphasized this week, saying competitors such as GitHub and GitLab have a commanding lead in the market.
"Most of [the discontinued services] had functionally been abandoned already," said Andrew Cornwall, an analyst at Forrester Research. "CodeCommit had trouble getting traction as developers looked for solutions elsewhere. Performance wasn't the best, and today developers want multicloud solutions. Those integrations weren't on the AWS roadmap or even in their interest."
With hundreds of services, it's inevitable that AWS will discontinue some over time, as it did previously with products such as Honeycode, said Larry Carvalho, an independent analyst at RobustCloud. AWS launched Honeycode in 2020 and shut it down this past February.
"This is standard practice in the cloud industry, which does not change my opinion about AWS," he said.
However, the change to AWS CodeCommit calls into question Amazon's entire strategy for developer tools for one industry expert.
"Moving out of the Git and IDE business … tears a hole into the overall AWS platform strategy," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group. "AWS is now basically sending the Git and IDE business to Microsoft, risking that even more customers will get hooked on their incredibly successful GitHub Actions framework."
Beth Pariseau, senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.
