In a series of blog posts, AWS has announced the scheduled retirements of several services, including AWS App Mesh and AWS DeepComposer. This new wave of deprecations follows a similar set of retirements earlier in the summer, marking a shift in the cloud provider’s long-standing commitment to existing services.
The most prominent announcement concerns AWS App Mesh, a service mesh designed to monitor and control services running on ECS, EKS, and EC2. Olly Pomeroy, developer advocate at AWS, shows how to migrate to ECS Service Connect, a newer solution for connecting microservices on AWS, and writes:
We have made the decision to discontinue AWS App Mesh, effective September 30th, 2026. Until this date, existing AWS App Mesh customers will be able to use the service as normal (…) AWS will continue to provide critical security and availability updates to AWS App Mesh during this period. However, starting from September 24th, 2024, new customers will be unable to onboard.
Later this month, AWS will restrict access to Amazon FSx File Gateway, a low-latency managed storage solution with local caching designed for on-premises deployment. Ed Laura, senior product solutions architect at AWS, explains how to switch a file share access to FSx for Windows File Server, and reassures developers:
This change will not impact existing customers. AWS continues to invest in security and availability for FSx File Gateway. We will continue releasing security updates for FSx File Gateway.
While AWS had previously committed to long-term support of its existing services, as Werner Vogels emphasized a year ago with the message, “SimpleDB is still around,” this is not the first wave of deprecations in 2024, suggesting a partial shift in strategy.
The cloud provider also plans to retire several older services in the machine learning space, including AWS DeepComposer, a musical keyboard that helps developers learn generative AI by creating original music, and Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a machine learning service designed for predictive maintenance of industrial equipment. Kanchan Jagannathan, senior program manager at AWS, warns:
If you have data stored on the AWS DeepComposer console, you will be able to use AWS DeepComposer as normal until September 17, 2025, when support for the service will end.
Coney Quinn, cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, comments:
Good on AWS for announcing this clearly. Bad on AWS for hiding a similar deprecation of Lookout for Equipment, a service that never outran the shadow of its truly ridiculous name.
Stuart Gillen, senior manager at AWS, explains how developers can maintain access to Lookout for Equipment after it closes to new customers, and outlines alternatives, primarily built around Amazon SageMaker. Additionally, AWS announced that this year will mark the final AWS DeepRacer League championship, a competition originally designed to teach machine learning in an engaging way. Shashank Murthy, senior product marketing manager at AWS, writes:
As we celebrate the achievements of over 560,000 participants from more than 150 countries who sharpened their skills through the AWS DeepRacer League over the last 6 years, we also prepare to close this chapter with a final season (…) While the AWS DeepRacer League will no longer be a globally hosted competition by AWS in 2025, you can continue to access the AWS DeepRacer service for training, evaluation, and community racing on the AWS Management Console until December 2025.
The AWS DeepRacer source code will soon be available as an AWS solution. Tomasz Ptak, a former AWS DeepRacer League finalist and AWS Hero, comments:
This isn’t exactly the end of DeepRacer. As an open sourced solution or will still be available to all those who would like to organise an event in their organisation or at a school. Also the community is still here, supporting those who take part in the league or just want to learn something new.
Finally, AWS announced the discontinuation of NICE EnginFrame, a unified interface for integrating on-premises and AWS high performance computing environments. Quinn adds:
Rather than the drip-drip-drip of deprecations we’ve seen all year from AWS, they’d be better served by just ripping the band-aid off with an omnibus post announcing EOL for all the effected services and being done with it.
Earlier in the summer, the cloud provider announced the sunsetting of AWS CodeCommit, a managed source control service, AWS Cloud9, a cloud-based IDE, and Amazon Forecast, a time-series forecasting service. The quantum ledger database QLDB has also been retired, as previously reported on InfoQ.
