AWS Retires EC2 after fiteen year - Here’s what you need to know

EC2-Classic Networking is Retiring – Here’s How to Prepare

 Amazon web services announced its plan to retire its classic product EC2. Users will not be able to use the service after Aug 15th. AWS is already notifying the remaining EC2-Classic customers via their account teams, and will soon start to issue notices in the Personal Health Dashboard. Here are the important dates for your calendar:

All AWS accounts created after December 4, 2013, are already VPC-only unless EC2-Classic was enabled as a result of a support request. By  October 30, 2021, AWS has disabled EC2-Classic in Regions for AWS accounts that have no active EC2-Classic resources in the Region, as listed below. AWS will also stop selling 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances for EC2-Classic.

On August 15, 2022, all migrations are expected to be completed, with no remaining EC2-Classic resources present in any AWS account.

Affected Resources

In order to fully migrate from EC2-Classic to VPC, you need to find, examine, and migrate all of the following resources:

• Running or stopping RDS database instances.
• Elastic IP addresses – You can use the move-address-to-vpc command.
• Classic Load Balancers – Migrate Your Classic Load Balancer.
• Redshift clusters – How do I Move my Amazon Redshift Cluster?
• Elastic Beanstalk environments – Migrating Elastic Beanstalk environments from EC2-Classic to a VPC.
• EMR clusters – Configure EMR Networking.
• AWS Data Pipelines pipelines – Launching Resources for Your Pipeline into a VPC.
• ElastiCache clusters – Understanding ElastiCache and Amazon VPCs.
• Reserved Instances – You can modify these as described in the User Guide.
• Spot Requests.
• Capacity Reservations.
• In preparation for your migration, be sure to read Migrate from EC2-Classic to a VPC.

You may need to create (or re-create, if you deleted it) the default VPC for your account. 

In some cases you will be able to modify the existing resources; in others, you will need to create new and equivalent resources in a VPC.

Finding EC2-Classic Resources

Use the EC2 Classic Resource Finder script to find all of the EC2-Classic resources in your account. You can run this directly in a single AWS account, or you can use the included multi-account wrapper to run it against each account of an AWS Organization. The Resource Finder visits each AWS Region, looks for specific resources, and generates a set of CSV files. Here’s the first part of the output from my run:

The script takes a few minutes to run. I inspect the list of CSV files to get a sense of how much work I need to do:

And then I take a look inside to learn more:

Migration Tools

Here’s an overview of the migration tools that you can use to migrate your AWS resources:

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) – Use AWS MGN to migrate your instances and your databases from EC2-Classic to VPC with minimal downtime. This service uses block-level replication and runs on multiple versions of Linux and Windows (read How to Use the New AWS Application Migration Service for Lift-and-Shift Migrations to learn more). The first 90 days of replication are free for each server that you migrate; see the AWS Application Migration Service Pricing page for more information.

Support Automation Workflow – The AWSSupport-MigrateEC2ClassicToVPC runbook supports simple, instance-level migration. It converts the source instance to an AMI, creates mirrors of the security groups, and launches new instances in the destination VPC.

After you have migrated all of the resources within a particular region, you can disable EC2-Classic by creating a support case. You can do this if you want to avoid accidentally creating new EC2-Classic resources in the region, but it is definitely not required.

Disabling EC2-Classic in a region is intended to be a one-way door, but you can contact AWS Support if you run it and then find that you need to re-enable EC2-Classic for a region. Be sure to run the Resource Finder that was mentioned earlier and make sure that you have not left any resources behind. These resources will continue to run and accrue charges even after the account status has been changed.

IP Address Migration – If you are migrating an EC2 instance and any Elastic IP addresses associated with the instance, you can use move-address-to-vpc and then attach the Elastic IP to the migrated instance. This will allow you to continue to reference the instance by the original DNS name.

Classic Load Balancers – If you plan to migrate a Classic Load Balancer and need to preserve the original DNS names, please contact AWS Support or your AWS account team.

Updating Instance Types

All of the instance types that are available in EC2-Classic are also available in VPC. However, many newer instance types are available only in VPC, and you may want to consider an update as part of your overall migration plan. Here’s a map to get you started (the * indicates that there are multiple instances with the same name prefix):