AWS is retiring EC2-Classic, the original iteration of its virtual cloud computing instance.

“EC2-Classic has served us well, but we’re going to give it a gold watch and a well-deserved sendoff!” said AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr.

First launched in 2006, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was one of the first products AWS offered, providing a virtual CPU to customers. The company launched a first come, first serve public beta test in August 2006, and went into full production dropping the beta label in October 2008.

With EC2-Classic, instances run in a single, flat network that shared with other customers. Modern EC2 instances run within Amazon VPC; a virtual private cloud (VPC) that's logically isolated to AWS accounts.

Accounts created after December 2013 do not support EC2-Classic – unless enabled as a result of a support request – meaning this is only going to affect long-standing AWS customers.

The company aims to disable EC2-Classic in Regions for AWS accounts that have no active EC2-Classic resources in the Region on October 30, 2021. It will also stop selling 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances for EC2-Classic at this time.

From August 2022 AWS expects all migrations to be complete, with no remaining EC2-Classic resources present in any AWS account.

“We don’t plan to disrupt any workloads and will do our best to help you to meet these dates,” said Barr, whose blog post includes useful migration information.

The founders of the EC2 project inside Amazon, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, formed cloud software startup Nimbula in 2008, which was acquired by Oracle in 2013.