Vendor retirements

Vendor retirements

A while ago, I posed a challenge to the group about how to schlepp data acquired through an M&A activity. (No archive link yet, but soon!)

One of the technologies, I mentioned was Amazon’s Snowcone, but come to find out, it is now being slated for retirement. As Runtime covered recently, Amazon is joining the rest of the cloud community in retiring unpopular services.

While we cannot fault this particular decision, it does change the calculus a little when it comes to conveying options whether you are looking to import the data from the acquired company into your AWS tenant, or export it into your on-prem data center.

As per Amazon’s announcement, you can no longer order a device as of the date of the announcement regardless of whether you are a new or existing customer, and if you have one, you have until one year after the announcement to do something with the data.

From a post-acquisition/integration standpoint, this creates yet another deadline that must be accounted for that will impact your conveyance. While this is one example and a cloud vendor known for not retiring technologies, imagine the flip side of a vendor such as Google that introduces and retires technologies all the time.

What do you suppose that impact would look like?

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