- Amazon halted new user sign-ups for several cloud services, causing customer confusion.
- Even some of the AWS employees were unaware of the changes, internal messages show.
- Some see the move as AWS refocusing on its core infrastructure services.
Amazon's recent decision to stop accepting new users for several cloud services caught some customers, partners and even a few employees by surprise.
Some people only found out about it through social media, and were confused about the extent of the changes. Many users saw it as a first step towards eventually shutting down these services, as Amazon has done occasionally with other offerings in the past.
It turns out that even some of Amazon's own salespeople were not aware of the change until after it was made public late last week.
Some Amazon Web Services employees expressed frustration in an internal Slack channel, according to screenshots of their messages obtained by Business Insider. They were caught off guard and confused by the sudden announcement, with at least one sales engineer saying they even tried to sell one of the services last week, unaware of the impending change.
"They are shooting themselves in the foot by not being proactive," this person wrote in the Slack channel.
No new customers, no new features
For a business as important as AWS, deprioritizing services is a tricky balancing act. If offerings are not popular, there's a business case for moving on. However, at the scale of AWS, this still means that thousands of developers and other customers likely still rely on these cloud tools. The company is trying to keep supporting clients while signaling that these offerings are no longer a strategic priority.
The issues began last week, when AWS stopped accepting new users for developer tools including CodeCommit and Cloud9. That stoked fears among some customers that they might lose access to these services and not be able to scale existing projects that rely on the technology.
As the public outcry grew, AWS's chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote a short X post on Tuesday to explain that the company decided to "discontinue new access to a small number of services," but it would continue running them in a secure environment.
The list of services he mentioned included S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, and CodeCommit. Some salespeople in the internal Slack channel also appeared to have learned about the list of deprioritized services through Barr's X post.
AWS's spokesperson, Patrick Neighorn, told BI that the changes were communicated through multiple channels within and outside the company. The services will remain available to existing customers, and AWS will continue to make "security, availability, and performance enhancements," though it won't add new features going forward, Neighorn added.
"We communicated these changes broadly through many internal and external channels, including blog posts, web banners, the AWS Console, internal communications to employees, and more," Neighorn said in an email statement. "We will continue to support our customers, whether they continue to use these services, or they migrate to other AWS offerings or alternative third-party solutions."
Not a 'one-stop-cloud-shop'
Some AWS experts saw the move as a first step towards eliminating the unpopular AWS services, so the company can focus on its core products and other more strategically important projects. For years, AWS has launched dozens of new software services and tools in hopes of expanding beyond its pioneering cloud infrastructure, with mixed results. AWS still gets most of its business from infrastructure services, like cloud storage and compute.
"AWS is deprecating the things no one uses," Randall Hunt, VP of cloud at Caylent, an AWS partner company, wrote on X.
Neighorn, AWS's spokesperson, disputed the notion that AWS hasn't been successful outside of core infrastructure services.
"It's not correct to report that AWS hasn't been successful outside of core infrastructure services. Consider Amazon Q, Amazon Connect, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Marketplace, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon QuickSight, and many other offerings that have had significant success with customers," he wrote in an email. "We are the top leader, or leader of leaders, on all calibrations of measurement in hundreds of third-party evaluations each year, and no one else is even close."
Dotan Horovits, principal developer advocate for cloud startup Logz.io, who blogged about the controversy this week, said almost all of the services affected were developer tools, like services that help write and debug application code.
He said the change reflects AWS's realization that it still has a long way to go to be successful in areas other than cloud infrastructure.
"The broader signal here is simple: the one-stop-cloud-shop approach has failed," Horovits said. "AWS can't be everything to everyone."
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