Amazon is discontinuing a number of its AWS services for new users, including CodeCommit, S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast and Data Pipeline.

CodeCommit is a fully managed source control service that hosts private Git repositories. Amazon says it makes it easier for teams to securely collaborate on code with contributions encrypted in transit.

S3 Select can be used to use structured query language (SQL) statements to filter the contents of an Amazon S3 object and retrieve only the subset of data that you need to reduce the amount of data that Amazon S3 transfers, so reducing the cost and latency of retrieval.

CloudSearch is a fully managed cloud service intended for searching large collections of data.

Cloud9 IDE is an Online IDE that includes a browser-based code editor, debugger, and terminal. It supports multiple programming languages, including C, C++, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, JavaScript with Node.js, and Go.

SimpleDB is a simple database storage solution that allows developers to simply store and query data items via web services requests.

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses statistical and machine learning algorithms to deliver time-series forecasts.

Data Pipeline is a web service that you can use to automate the movement and transformation of data.

For most of these services, there is already a better known and more popular alternative, often distributed as open source, which probably explains the decision to drop them.

The news of the decision wasn't announced. It became apparent only when users received notifications that they couldn't open a new account. As word started to spread, Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS, put out a tweet saying that:

"After giving it a lot of thought, we made the decision to discontinue new access to a small number of services, including AWS CodeCommit"

The rest of the services being discontinued for new accounts wasn't included until people replying to the tweet asked specifically what else was going, at which point Barr listed the other services.  On closer inspection, there are other services that come up with the same message when accessed, including Finspace, a financial services product; Workdocs, for document sharing; and Snowmobile, a data transfer service.

It looks as though Amazon has realized that AWS needs to concentrate on the services that are its core offerings rather than trying to provide everything a customer might ever want. Amazon's strategy of offering everything including the kitchen sink to ensure it wins against Google and Microsoft in the cloud computing market may now be replaced with an alternative lure.

More Information

AWS Website

Related Articles

AWS CodeCatalyst Instant Projects

New Amazon Build Services

Amazon Releases PartiQL, A One Stop Query Language

AWS Announces CloudSearch

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info