By Dr. Robert Buccigrossi, TCG CTO
Recently, we received a notification from Amazon Web Services about retiring its original Amazon Glacier service. Unlike the usual notice along these lines, something about this amazed me: all current customers will be able to use the service indefinitely.
“After careful consideration, we have decided to stop accepting new customers for Amazon Glacier (original standalone vault-based service) starting on December 15, 2025. […] You can continue using Amazon Glacier normally, and there is no requirement to migrate your data. […] Your data remains secure and accessible, and you can continue to add data to your Glacier Vaults.”
This decision is a powerful indicator of AWS’s philosophy and reinforces why platform stability is a critical factor in our technology strategy. So I was curious, how does AWS’s service retirement compare with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud?
The Gold Standard: AWS and a Culture of Longevity
AWS’s approach to service retirement is a demonstrated culture of not breaking customer workloads. The ultimate example of this is the retirement of EC2-Classic. Launched in 2006, EC2-Classic was the foundational networking model for the entire cloud industry. Despite being superseded by Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) technology in 2009, AWS kept it running for another 14 years to support its earliest adopters.
When the time finally came to say goodbye, the process was a masterclass in change management. AWS gave customers over two years’ notice, from the announcement in July 2021 to the final shutdown in August 2023. They provided dedicated migration tools, detailed runbooks, and direct support to ensure a smooth transition. As AWS CTO Werner Vogels put it, the team kept Classic “running (and running well) until every instance was shut down or migrated”. This is the philosophy in action: the provider absorbs the complexity to shield the customer from disruption.
The Enterprise Playbook: Microsoft Azure’s Predictability
Microsoft Azure, with its deep enterprise roots, offers a similarly mature and, crucially, predictable approach. Their service lifecycle is highly structured, providing the long-term planning horizons that businesses require. The Azure Services Retirement Workbook is an interactive dashboard that gives us a centralized view of every resource in our environment that will be affected by an upcoming retirement, complete with deadlines and links to migration guides.
Their timelines for major transitions are consistently measured in years. The platform-wide migration from the classic Azure Service Manager (ASM) to the modern Azure Resource Manager (ARM), a project comparable in scale to the EC2-Classic retirement, was a multi-year, phased process with a final deadline set roughly 4.5 years after the initial announcement. This commitment to long-term, predictable change is a hallmark of a reliable enterprise partner.
Table 1: Recent Azure Service Retirement Timelines
| Service Being Retired | Announcement Context | Retirement Date | Total Notice Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Azure Service Manager (ASM) | Announced Feb 2020 | ~4.5 Years | |
| Cloud Services (classic) | Part of ASM retirement | ~4.5 Years | |
| Azure Unmanaged Disks | Deprecation began Sep 2022 | ~3.5 Years | |
| Azure Basic Load Balancer | Announced Sep 2022 | 3 Years | |
| Azure Database for MariaDB | Announced Sep 2023 | 2 Years |
The Other Side of the Coin: Google Cloud and Operational Risk
Google Cloud presents a more complex picture. It actively is fighting a “Killed by Google” narrative of rapidly discontinued consumer products. It became such a significant concern for enterprise customers that in July 2021, Google moved to formalize its cloud deprecation policy to provide more assurance.
This policy now states that Google will typically provide at least a 12-month notice before discontinuing a Generally Available (GA) service. However, more concerning than any planned retirement is the risk of an unplanned one. In May 2024, Google Cloud accidentally deleted the entire private cloud account of UniSuper, a $125 billion Australian pension fund. A simple misconfiguration of an internal tool by a Google engineer triggered a catastrophic chain of events that wiped out all of the fund’s applications, data, and services—including their backups stored across two geographic regions.
The week-long outage was only resolved because UniSuper had the foresight to maintain backups with a completely separate, third-party provider. This incident reveals a critical weakness in operational safeguards and elevates our assessment of vendor risk from one of policy to one of fundamental stability.
Final Analysis: Predictability is a Key Foundation
A choice of a cloud provider is a long-term architectural commitment. The table below summarizes the stark differences in approach.
Table 2: Comparative Analysis of Cloud Retirement Policies
| Dimension | Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud Platform (GCP) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Formal Policy | Precedent-Driven: Policy is demonstrated through a consistent culture of customer obsession and long-term support. | Highly Codified: Formal, documented lifecycle policies with clear timelines (e.g., 12-month minimums). | Codified: Formal 12-month minimum policy for GA services, but often overshadowed by reputation. |
| Communication | Blog posts from leadership, Personal Health Dashboard, account teams. Effective but decentralized. | Systematic & Centralized: Azure Updates, portal notifications, direct email, and proactive tooling. | Documentation updates, announcements. Can be difficult to track comprehensively. |
| Typical Notice Period | 2+ Years: For recent hard retirements (EC2-Classic, Proton). Indefinite for “soft” retirements. | 2–3+ Years: Consistently provides very long runways for major service retirements. | 1–2 Years: Adheres to its 12-month minimum, sometimes extending to 2 years for major services. |
| Migration Support | Excellent & Bespoke: Provides dedicated tools (e.g., MGN) and detailed guidance for major migrations. | Excellent & Integrated: Provides extensive documentation and proactive, integrated tooling (Advisor, Workbook). | Good: Provides documentation and migration paths for planned deprecations. |
| Legacy Handling | Gold Standard: Famous for supporting legacy services like SimpleDB for existing customers indefinitely. | Systematic Migration: Focuses on migrating customers from “classic” to modern equivalents on a clear schedule. | Mixed: Will retire services (e.g., IoT Core) after a notice period; less emphasis on indefinite legacy support. |
| Operational Stability Risk | Low: Proven track record of operational stability over nearly two decades. | Low: Strong enterprise track record and mature operational processes. | High: The UniSuper incident reveals a critical risk of catastrophic operational failure, undermining trust. |
The recent AWS Glacier announcement is a welcome reminder that true enterprise-grade service includes stability and predictability. These are the foundation of a sound technology strategy. The demonstrated track records of AWS and Azure give us the confidence to recommend their platforms for our customers’ mission-critical workloads.
Works cited
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