AWS Launches Centralized Product Lifecycle Page: Transparency and Consolidating Deprecation Info

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AWS recently launched its Product Lifecycle page, a new centralized resource providing comprehensive information on service availability changes. With this initiative, the company aims to streamline how customers track service deprecations, end-of-support timelines, and restrictions on new customer access.

The AWS Product Lifecycle page consolidates information into three key categories: services closing access to new customers, services announcing end of support (including migration paths and timelines), and services already reaching their end-of-support date.

Wojtek Szczepucha, a solution architect at AWS, posted on LinkedIn:

Now, you can check if and which services will reach the end-of-support. However, it's not only that, with the AWS Product Lifecycle page, you will know:

- WHY has this decision been made?

- HOW can you handle this situation? With the alternate solutions proposed.

Adding to the positive reception, cloud economist Corey Quinn offered his analysis, stating he was "happier" about this round of deprecations for two reasons. Firstly, he noted the benefit of a consolidated announcement of multiple deprecations, contrasting it with the potentially unsettling "drip-drip-drip" of individual deprecations seen previously. In addition, Quinn argued that this batching, coupled with clear rationales and transition plans (as highlighted by Szczepucha), builds customer confidence.

Secondly, Quinn emphasized the significant improvement in having a unified location for service and feature deprecation information, moving away from a fragmented landscape of blog posts and documentation updates.

This sentiment was echoed by Luc van Donkersgoed, an AWS Serverless Hero, in a LinkedIn post:

AWS is finally taking a mature stance on service deprecations!

Currently, the new page lists initial updates for services like Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics (closing to new customers), Amazon Pinpoint, and others reaching the end of support.

With the new page, the company follows up with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud practices, offering mechanisms for communicating service lifecycles through platforms like Azure's Lifecycle Policy and Google Cloud's documentation and release notes.

For instance, Microsoft Azure provides its Microsoft Lifecycle Policy page, offering searchable information on support timelines, and Azure Updates for broader announcements. At the same time, Google Cloud communicates through service-specific documentation, release notes, and defined Product Launch Stages.

Lastly, the authors of the AWS News blog post on the new page recommend bookmarking the page and checking out What’s New with AWS? for upcoming AWS service availability updates.

Related Topics:

• Development
• Architecture & Design
• DevOps
• AWS
• Software Development Lifecycle
• Amazon Web Services
• Amazon
• Best Practices
• Cloud Adoption
• Cloud
• Operations management
• Product Management

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