As a software developer and architect I have spent countless hours discussing the benefits, the costs and the challenges of deprecating an API or a service in a product. AWS has the opportunity and the business model to skip the entire discussion and simply use the pricing element to make a service useless.

Let’s take the Reduced Redundancy Storage option for Amazon S3. It has been around since 2010 and the advantage versus standard storage is (actually, was) the cost. As for the AWS documentation:

It provides a cost-effective, highly available solution for distributing or sharing content that is durably stored elsewhere, or for storing thumbnails, transcoded media, or other processed data that can be easily reproduced. The RRS option stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing 400 times the durability of a typical disk drive, but does not replicate objects as many times as standard Amazon S3 storage

Again, the only benefit of Reduced Redundancy Storage is the cost. Once you remove the cost discount, it’s a useless feature.

If you make it more expensive than standard storage you are effectively deprecating it without having to change a single SDK or API signature. And that’s exactly what AWS did lowering the price of standard storage class without changing the one for the Reduced Redundancy Storage option.

These are the prices for US East (N. Virginia) but similar differences apply in other regions:

Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage

The only real change was then moving the RRS from the main S3 page (where now the options do not include RRS anymore) to a separate one.

Amazon S3

S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage is still there, they did not even increase the price of the service. But it’s a dead feature and you have no reason to use it anymore. An amazing approach to the challenge of deprecation.