Amazon is discontinuing EC2-Classic environments in AWS

Amazon discontinues EC2-Classic in AWS. The network was underlying Elastic Compute Cloud, but Amazon wants to transition users to more modern alternatives like Virtual Private Cloud. EC2-Classic must be completely gone by August 2022 at the latest.

Amazon writes in a blog post that users of EC2-Classic should migrate to an alternative. As of October 30 of this year, all inactive EC2-Classic environments will be disabled. Amazon will also stop selling new Reserved Instances from that moment on. On August 15, 2022, EC2-Classic will be removed from every AWS account everywhere.

There is written a migration guide for customers who want to transfer their services to a Virtual Private Cloud. They have to do that first create a new VPC and track down existing EC2-Classic environments. Amazon also has set up a migration service, and created a guide for porting certain instance types that are not available in VPC. The migration will involve “minimal downtime,” Amazon says.

Amazon doesn’t say why it wants to get rid of EC2-Classic, but that’s probably because it wasn’t used much. EC2-Classic was the third service introduced in Amazon Web Services in 2006, alongside Simple Storage Services and Simple Queue Service. There are now more modern alternatives such as Virtual Private Clouds, which later become the default for all users. EC2-Classic was therefore little used. Since December 2013, all new AWS accounts became VPCs by default, although it was possible to specifically request an EC2-Classic environment.