AWS Services Being Retired in 2026: The Full List, Every Deadline, and What to Use Instead

AWS is retiring a long list of services in 2026, and some of the dates are this week. Tomorrow, October 7, 2026, AWS WAF Classic, AWS Proton, AWS IoT Greengrass V1 and Amazon Lookout for Equipment reach end of support, and Amazon FinSpace shuts down. Amazon Pinpoint ends on October 30. Two more services close to new customers on October 29. And on July 30, AWS quietly closed eight SageMaker AI features to new customers, including Model Monitor, Clarify, Ground Truth and the free SageMaker Studio Lab that countless tutorials still send beginners to, along with Amazon Kendra, Amazon Q Business and the original Bedrock Agents. Here is the part most lists get wrong: "closed to new customers" does not mean switched off. If your account already used one of these services, it keeps working, often for years. What it means is that every new account, every new project and every new tutorial reader is locked out, so the advice you read last year may no longer be advice you can follow.

Jake found out the hard way, sort of. His phone repair shop sends a text reminder the day before every repair booking, and those reminders stopped no-shows almost overnight when his freelancer set them up two years ago. On Saturday his nephew, who is taking a machine learning course, asked Jake to help him sign up for SageMaker Studio Lab, the free notebook service the course recommends. The sign-up page would not take them. That sent Jake down a rabbit hole, and at the bottom of it was a line he had never read in an AWS email: Amazon Pinpoint, the service behind his reminders, ends on October 30. "Last time the reminders broke for a week," he told Ethan, "nine people didn't show up. That's about $450 I never got back." Ethan's answer was calmer than Jake expected. "Your texts aren't going anywhere. The part of Pinpoint that's ending is the campaign scheduler, not the sending. Let me show you which is which." This page is that conversation, widened to every service on AWS's list: what each word in AWS's lifecycle language means, every deadline in the next twelve months, what AWS says to use instead, how to check whether your own account is affected, and the myths, like CodeCommit, that keep scaring people for no reason.

If AWS still feels like a wall of product names, the plain-English guide to SageMaker is a good first stop, because the biggest single change on this list happened inside SageMaker AI. Everything below is current as of October 6, 2026, and it comes from AWS's own lifecycle tables, which list every service in maintenance, in sunset and in full shutdown.

What "maintenance", "sunset" and "end of support" actually mean on AWS

AWS uses four stages for a service that is on its way out, and the difference between them is the difference between "do nothing" and "you have a deadline." Most of the panic online comes from people reading the word "retired" in a headline and assuming the worst.

Two details are worth knowing before you read the lists.

"Existing customer" is decided per account, and by a date. For services with a published end date, the wording is specific: you count as an existing customer if your account signed up before the cut-off. Pinpoint's cut-off was May 20, 2025; DevOps Guru's is October 29, 2026; WorkMail's was April 30, 2026. A brand-new AWS account opened by the same company after that date is a new customer, even if your other accounts use the service every day. That catches teams who create a fresh account for each project.

The sign-up door closes about a month after the announcement. AWS publishes its changes in quarterly batches, and new-customer access ends roughly 30 days later. The batch announced on June 30, 2026 closed on July 30; the one announced on September 29 closes on October 29. For a few services, AWS's own notes say plainly that if you want the service, you should sign up before that date. That window is real, but think hard before you use it: signing up to a service in maintenance means building on something that will never get another feature.

"So if I'm already in, I'm fine?" Jake asked. "For maintenance, yes," Ethan said. "Nobody is turning anything off. You just stop expecting improvements, and you plan your next project somewhere else. Sunset is the one with a calendar."

Every AWS end-of-life deadline from now to 2027

These are the dates that require action. If you use a service on this list, the date is when it stops working for you. They are in calendar order, starting with the ones that have just passed, because a few of them caught people this autumn.

A few of these deserve a closer look, because what ends is not always what people expect.

AWS WAF Classic is not the same thing as AWS WAF. Classic is the version from before November 2019. If your web ACLs were created on the current version, nothing changes for you on October 7. If they still live in Classic, they need to be migrated to the current AWS WAF, and AWS has a migration path for exactly that. Our AWS WAF setup guide covers the current version from scratch.

AWS Proton ends on October 7, but your infrastructure does not. Proton was a delivery tool: it deployed CloudFormation stacks for you. After the end date you lose the Proton console and Proton's own resources, while the stacks it deployed, and the servers, databases and networks inside them, keep running. What you need is a new way to update them, such as CloudFormation Git sync or a CI/CD pipeline you already use.

AWS IoT Greengrass V1 is listed with an end of support of October 7, 2026 in AWS's lifecycle table, while an older Greengrass product page gave an earlier date. Either way, V1 is finished. If you still have devices on V1, the move is to Greengrass V2, and the work is usually in updating the software on the devices rather than in the cloud.

Amazon Pinpoint is the one that worried Jake, so it gets its own section below.

Amazon Pinpoint ends October 30: what stops, and what keeps working

Pinpoint was really two products in one box, and only one of them is going away.

• The engagement side: endpoints, segments, campaigns, journeys and analytics. This is the part that decided who gets a message and when. It ends on October 30, 2026, together with the Pinpoint console.
• The messaging side: the APIs that actually send SMS, voice, mobile push, one-time passwords and phone number validation. These are not affected. They already live under AWS End User Messaging and keep working.

That is why Ethan told Jake his texts were not going anywhere. What Jake needed to check was how his reminders were built. If the freelancer's code called the SMS API directly for each booking, nothing breaks. If the reminders were a scheduled Pinpoint campaign or journey, that schedule stops on October 30, and the reminders stop with it.

"How do I tell?" Jake asked. "Open Pinpoint and look for campaigns or journeys," Ethan said. "If the list is empty, you're on the API and you're fine. If there's a campaign called something like 'booking reminder', that's the bit we have to move."

For the engagement side, AWS points to two destinations depending on the job:

• Amazon Connect Customer outbound campaigns for agent-assisted engagement and campaign-style outreach.
• AWS End User Messaging with Amazon SES for high-volume transactional messages, such as reminders, receipts and one-time codes, especially when you need more throughput than outbound campaign limits allow.

For a small business like Jake's, the simplest move is usually the second: a short scheduled job, for example a Lambda function on an EventBridge schedule, that reads tomorrow's bookings and sends each reminder through End User Messaging. It is a small piece of code, and it removes the dependency on Pinpoint entirely. Export any segment or analytics data you want to keep before October 30, because after that date the Pinpoint resources are no longer accessible.

SageMaker AI: Model Monitor, Clarify, Studio Lab and five more closed to new customers

This is the change that will confuse the most people for the longest time, because these features fill textbooks, certification courses and years of blog posts. AWS announced it on June 30, 2026, and since July 30 the following SageMaker AI features have been closed to new customers. Existing customers can keep using them, AWS keeps investing in their security and availability, and no new features are planned.

Two more SageMaker AI items have dates rather than just closed doors: SageMaker Profiler ends on June 30, 2027, and Ground Truth Plus, the fully managed labeling service, already shut down on June 30, 2026.

SageMaker Model Monitor: what replaces it

Model Monitor solved a real problem: a model trained on last year's data slowly gets worse as the world changes, which the industry calls drift. What AWS offers instead is not one product but a kit. The open-source SageMaker AI monitoring solutions, published in AWS's samples on GitHub, run inside your own account and are built from ordinary AWS services: SageMaker AI with MLflow, Athena, Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, SNS and QuickSight, combined with the open-source Evidently AI library for the drift statistics. They cover batch inference, real-time endpoints, LLM evaluation and GPU usage, and you set your own thresholds.

On top of that, CloudWatch handles the system side: latency, errors, CPU and GPU use, plus alarms with anomaly detection on your endpoint metrics. QuickSight adds dashboards for the people who need to see trends without opening a notebook.

The honest trade-off: Model Monitor was a feature you switched on; its replacement is an architecture you deploy and own. For a team with one model, that may feel like a lot. A reasonable middle path is CloudWatch alarms on your endpoint metrics today, plus a scheduled job that runs Evidently's drift report on a sample of recent predictions each week. That catches the two failures that matter most, the model breaking and the model drifting, with very little to maintain.

SageMaker Clarify: the bias math was always the easy part

Clarify produced two things: bias reports, measuring whether a dataset or model treats groups differently, and explanations of which features drove a prediction. AWS's replacement guidance makes a point that is worth repeating for anyone studying for an exam. The bias metrics Clarify reported, such as the difference in proportions of labels and disparate impact, are published formulas computed from label counts and confusion-matrix numbers. You can reproduce them with pandas and scikit-learn in a few lines of code you own. And Clarify's feature explanations came from the SHAP library, which you can use directly.

For generative AI, AWS points Clarify's foundation-model evaluation users to Amazon Bedrock Evaluations and Bedrock Guardrails. That replacement covers language models only; it is not a substitute for bias detection on ordinary tabular models.

SageMaker Studio Lab: can you still use it for free?

This is the question with the most searches behind it, and the answer has two halves. If you created a Studio Lab account before July 30, 2026, it still works as before, and it is still free. If you did not, you cannot sign up anymore, which is exactly what happened to Jake's nephew.

AWS's suggested replacement is SageMaker Studio, which has the same JupyterLab notebook environment. The difference is that Studio lives inside an AWS account, so you need an account and a payment method, and the free tier is a starting allowance rather than the "free forever, no card" deal Studio Lab offered. If you are a student and do not want a card on file, free notebook services from outside AWS, or Jupyter running on your own laptop, are the realistic alternatives. If you do open an AWS account to learn, set a billing alert on day one; our guide to reading Cost Explorer shows how to see exactly what you are paying for.

"So the course is out of date," Jake said. "The course is fine," Ethan said. "The sign-up link isn't. The notebooks themselves will run almost anywhere."

Ground Truth and A2I: human labeling after Mechanical Turk

Ground Truth and Augmented AI both lost their biggest workforce option on September 30, when the Mechanical Turk workforce inside them ended, a day after Mechanical Turk itself reached end of support. Existing customers can still run labeling jobs with a private workforce of their own people or with a vendor workforce. New customers cannot start using either feature. If you are planning a new labeling project, budget for a vendor or an open-source labeling tool you host yourself. Our post on Mechanical Turk shutting down covers what the end of the platform meant for the people who worked on it.

Kendra, Q Business, Bedrock Agents Classic and Q Developer: AWS's AI reshuffle

The second big theme of 2026 is that AWS is folding its first wave of AI services into newer ones. None of these are being switched off for existing users yet, but every one of them now has a successor AWS would rather you use.

Amazon Kendra was AWS's enterprise search service: point it at your documents, intranet and file shares, and it answered questions with relevant passages. It has been closed to new customers since July 30, 2026. AWS recommends Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base for both migrations and new search projects, describing it as offering similar capabilities plus newer features for generative and agentic AI. If you were comparing Kendra with OpenSearch for a new project, the comparison is now between OpenSearch and a Bedrock knowledge base.

Amazon Q Business, the workplace AI assistant AWS promoted heavily in 2024 and 2025, closed to new customers on the same date. Its successor is Amazon Quick. AWS's migration path starts with bringing your existing Q Business index into Quick, so you do not have to rebuild the index from scratch.

Bedrock Agents, the original console-built agents launched in November 2023, has been renamed Bedrock Agents Classic and is closed to new customers. The successor is Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, where you bring your own agent code and AWS runs it. If the difference is still blurry, our explainer on what Bedrock AgentCore is walks through it. Knowledge Bases, Guardrails and Flows are not on the list.

Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins and the paid Q Developer subscriptions reach end of support on April 30, 2027. AWS's replacement is Kiro, its own agentic development environment, which works from written specifications rather than one prompt at a time. Twelve months is enough time to try Kiro on one real project before you move a team.

Three Amazon Comprehend features also closed to new customers on April 30, 2026: topic modeling, event detection and prompt safety classification. AWS points to Bedrock language models for topics and events, and Bedrock Guardrails for prompt safety. The rest of Comprehend, such as entity recognition and sentiment, is not affected.

"So everything with AI in the name is moving to Bedrock," Jake said. "Pretty much," Ethan said. "If you're starting something new this year, start it there and you won't be reading a page like this one about it next year."

Developer tools: App Runner, Cloud9, CodeCatalyst, Proton and Infrastructure Composer

Developer tools had the roughest couple of years, and the list here explains a lot of broken tutorials.

• AWS App Runner has been closed to new customers since April 30, 2026. AWS recommends Amazon ECS Express Mode for migrations, and publishes a guide for moving an App Runner service across and shifting traffic gradually with DNS. If a beginner tutorial tells you to deploy your first container with App Runner, use ECS Express Mode instead; our guide to what Amazon ECS is explains the pieces.
• AWS Cloud9, the browser-based IDE, closed to new customers back in July 2024. The suggested replacements are the AWS IDE Toolkits in your own editor, or AWS CloudShell for a quick terminal in the browser.
• Amazon CodeCatalyst closed to new customers on November 7, 2025. Existing customers keep their spaces but cannot create new ones. AWS's migration guide covers moving repositories to GitHub, GitLab or any other Git provider.
• AWS Proton ends on October 7, 2026, as covered above. Your deployed stacks stay; the Proton pipelines go.
• AWS Infrastructure Composer, the visual designer for CloudFormation templates, loses its standalone console on December 7, 2026, and ends completely on September 29, 2027. The same visual editor keeps working locally inside the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.
• AWS App Mesh ended on September 30, 2026. Amazon ECS Service Connect is the replacement for service-to-service networking on ECS.
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer stopped accepting new repository associations on November 7, 2025. Existing associations keep working, and code analysis is available through other AWS services.
• AWS Glue Ray jobs closed to new customers on April 30, 2026; AWS suggests Amazon EKS as the alternative for Ray workloads. The rest of AWS Glue is not affected.

One name that is not on the list deserves a sentence of its own: AWS CodeCommit. AWS stopped new sign-ups in July 2024, then reversed the decision and returned CodeCommit to general availability, open to new customers again, on November 25, 2025. If you moved your repositories away in a hurry, nothing forces you back, but if a guide tells you CodeCommit is end of life, that guide is out of date.

Security, compliance and operations: WAF Classic, Audit Manager, CloudTrail Lake, DevOps Guru

These matter most to anyone who has to answer an auditor, because a control that relies on a retiring service quietly becomes a finding.

• AWS WAF Classic reaches end of support on October 7, 2026. Migrate any remaining Classic web ACLs to the current AWS WAF.
• AWS Audit Manager stopped accepting new accounts on April 30, 2026. AWS points to the Config Resource Compliance Dashboard as an alternative. Note that AWS Backup Audit Manager, a feature of AWS Backup with a confusingly similar name, is a different product and is not on the list.
• AWS CloudTrail Lake closed to new customers on April 30, 2026. CloudTrail itself, with its free event history and trails to S3, is unaffected. Existing Lake customers who need Lake data for new accounts in their organization can create an organization event data store or move to Amazon CloudWatch. Our CloudTrail guide explains the difference between event history, trails and Lake.
• Amazon Inspector Classic, the 2015 version of Inspector with its own agent and assessment templates, shut down on May 20, 2026. The current Amazon Inspector is unaffected.
• Amazon DevOps Guru stops accepting new customers on October 29, 2026 and ends on September 30, 2027. After that date the console and API stop working, its CloudFormation resource types are withdrawn, and earlier insights can no longer be retrieved. AWS recommends CloudWatch for alerting and anomaly detection, and Amazon DevOps Agent for AI-assisted investigation. If your own dashboards or ticketing tools pull insights from the DevOps Guru API, those integrations need new data sources before the end date.
• AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager and Change Manager closed to new customers on November 7, 2025. For change management, AWS points to partner solutions; Incident Manager has its own migration guides.
• Amazon Application Recovery Controller readiness checks closed to new customers on April 30, 2026; AWS suggests ARC Region switch instead.

A practical tip from Ethan, who has sat through more audits than he would like: search your compliance documents and runbooks for the names on this page. A runbook that says "check the CloudTrail Lake query" or "review the Audit Manager report" is the kind of thing that fails quietly, months after anyone remembers why.

Email, telephony and desktops: WorkMail, Chime and WorkSpaces

• Amazon WorkMail closed to new accounts on April 30, 2026 and ends on March 31, 2027. Accounts that signed up before April 30 keep working until then. If your business email runs on WorkMail, start choosing a new email provider now; moving mailboxes, DNS records and staff habits takes longer than people expect.
• Amazon Chime, the meetings and chat app, ended on February 20, 2026, and its console closed on March 9, 2026. AWS suggested AWS Wickr or partner tools such as Zoom, Webex and Slack. The separate Amazon Chime SDK, used by developers to build calling into their own apps, continues, although its SIP Media Application feature closes to new customers on October 29, 2026, with Amazon Connect Customer as the suggested home for telephony workloads.
• Amazon WorkSpaces is changing in pieces rather than going away. WorkSpaces Secure Browser closes to new customers on October 29, 2026. The PCoIP streaming protocol and WorkSpaces Pools end on June 30, 2027, with the DCV protocol and WorkSpaces Applications as the replacements. WorkSpaces Thin Client ends on March 31, 2027.

Data, storage, identity and IoT: S3 Select, Glacier vaults, Simple AD and Greengrass

The changes in this group are the easiest to misread, because the retiring feature often shares a name with something that is staying.

• Amazon S3 Select and S3 Glacier Select, the features that ran simple SQL queries against a single stored file, closed to new customers in July 2024. Amazon S3 itself is obviously not going anywhere. For queries across many files, AWS points to Amazon Athena.
• Amazon S3 Glacier Direct means the original Glacier service with vaults and its own API. It closed to new customers in late 2025, and AWS publishes guidance for moving vault data into Amazon S3. The S3 Glacier storage classes that most people use today, such as Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Glacier Deep Archive, are part of S3 and are not affected.
• Amazon S3 Object Lambda, which transformed data as it was read from S3, closed to new customers on November 7, 2025. The alternatives AWS lists are CloudFront with Lambda, invoking Lambda through API Gateway or function URLs, or doing the processing in the client application.
• Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics closed to new customers in June 2025. Timestream for InfluxDB, a managed version of the open-source time-series database, is the suggested home.
• Amazon Cognito Sync, an old feature for syncing small amounts of user data across devices, closed to new customers on July 30, 2026, with AWS AppSync or DynamoDB as alternatives. Cognito user pools and identity pools, which handle sign-in, are unaffected.
• AWS Directory Service Simple AD closed to new customers on July 30, 2026. AWS Managed Microsoft AD is the main alternative AWS suggests.
• AWS IoT has several changes at once. Greengrass V1 ends on October 7, 2026, with Greengrass V2 as the replacement. AWS IoT Events shut down on May 20, 2026, and AWS IoT Analytics on December 15, 2025. IoT FleetWise, SiteWise Monitor and the SiteWise data processing pack are closed to new customers, with Amazon Managed Grafana suggested for SiteWise Monitor dashboards. The Detect feature of IoT Device Defender closed to new customers on August 31, 2026.
• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for SQL shut down on January 27, 2026. Its streaming successor on AWS is Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink.
• AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized and Storage Optimized devices closed to new customers in late 2025, and several older Snowball device types were fully retired on November 12, 2025.

The full list of AWS services in maintenance, sunset and shutdown

If you came here to check one name, use your browser's find feature on the tables below. The first lists every service and feature currently closed to new customers, with the date AWS announced it and the alternative AWS suggests. Where AWS names no single replacement, the table says so rather than guessing.

Closed to new customers (maintenance)

Sunset: services with an end date

Already shut down in 2026

Amazon Chime, the meetings app, does not appear in the shutdown table because it was retired separately; it ended on February 20, 2026, as described above. Amazon Linux 2 is also missing for a different reason: it is an operating system with its own support lifecycle, not an AWS service, and it reached end of support on June 30, 2026. If you still have servers on Amazon Linux 2, they no longer receive security updates, and the move is to Amazon Linux 2023.

What is not being retired: CodeCommit, Lambda, EKS and RDS

A lot of searches for "AWS end of life" are about things that are not retiring at all. Clearing them up saves a lot of unnecessary migration work.

• AWS CodeCommit is fully available and open to new customers again since November 25, 2025.
• AWS Lambda is not retiring. Individual language runtimes are, on a published schedule, as each language version reaches its own end of life. "Lambda end of life" almost always means "my Python or Node.js version is too old," and the fix is updating the runtime in your function settings.
• Amazon EKS is not retiring. Each Kubernetes version gets a fixed support window, and clusters on old versions must be upgraded or move into paid extended support.
• Amazon RDS is not retiring. Database engine versions reach end of standard support on their own schedules, and RDS Custom for Oracle, a niche variant, ends on March 31, 2027.
• Amazon Comprehend, Rekognition and SNS are not retiring. Only specific features of each are in maintenance, listed in the table above.

The pattern is simple once you see it. A version reaching end of life is routine housekeeping. A service in maintenance or sunset is a product decision. The second kind is what this page tracks.

How to check whether your AWS account uses any of these services

You do not need to read sixty service names and guess. These steps take about five minutes per account.

1. Open Cost Explorer and group by service. Set the date range to the last 12 months and group costs by service. Every service you have paid for appears in the list, even small ones. Compare it with the tables above. Our guide to reading Cost Explorer walks through the screens.
2. Check the AWS Health Dashboard. Open "Your account health" and look at scheduled changes and other notifications. AWS uses account-specific Health notifications for some of these changes, including reminders about resources that still need to move.
3. Look for free-tier and zero-cost usage. A service you use within a free allowance may not show a cost. If you remember setting something up, such as a Pinpoint project or a Studio Lab account, open its console and check directly.
4. Search your code and infrastructure templates. Search repositories and CloudFormation or Terraform files for service names and API prefixes such as pinpoint, proton, waf and waf-regional (the Classic APIs; the current version is wafv2), kendra, qbusiness and devops-guru.
5. Repeat for every account. If you use AWS Organizations, run the Cost Explorer check from the management account with costs grouped by linked account as well.

Jake's check took him four minutes. Cost Explorer showed Pinpoint and SNS, nothing else from the list. The Pinpoint console showed one campaign called "booking-reminder-24h". That was the answer: the freelancer had built the reminders as a scheduled campaign, so they would stop on October 30. A short scheduled function sending the same text through End User Messaging fixed it in an afternoon, with three weeks to spare.

What happens on the end date: is your data deleted?

This is the question that matters most and is answered least. For most services with an end date, AWS's wording is the same: after the date, you will no longer be able to access the console or the service's resources. In practice, treat that as "anything stored inside the service is gone unless you exported it first." What happens to the rest of your account depends on the service, and the differences are worth knowing.

• Pinpoint: endpoints, segments, campaigns, journeys and analytics become inaccessible on October 30, 2026. Export any audience lists and reports you want to keep before then.
• Proton: the Proton console and Proton resources go away, but the CloudFormation stacks Proton deployed, and everything inside them, keep running. You lose the pipeline, not the servers.
• DevOps Guru: after September 30, 2027 the console and API stop working, its CloudFormation resource types are withdrawn so templates that create them will fail, and insights it generated can no longer be retrieved.
• Greengrass V1: V1 resources in the cloud become inaccessible. Devices still running V1 software will need V2 to keep being managed from AWS.
• WorkMail: after March 31, 2027 the service can no longer be used. Move mailboxes and archives to your new provider well before the date, and keep a backup export of anything you are legally required to retain.
• SageMaker geospatial: existing customers are asked to export saved jobs to S3 using the export API operations, while the feature is still available.

For services that are only in maintenance, nothing is deleted. Your data and resources stay where they are, and the service keeps running. The risk there is slower: no new features, no new Regions, and the possibility that a future announcement adds an end date.

"So the real deadline for Pinpoint is the day before October 30," Jake said. "The real deadline is whenever you've tested the replacement," Ethan said. "October 30 is just the day you find out if you didn't."

Should you sign up before a service closes to new customers?

For the two services closing on October 29, Chime SDK SIP Media Application and WorkSpaces Secure Browser, there is still a short window to become an existing customer. AWS's own notes for Secure Browser say that if you want to use it, you should sign up before that date. The question is whether you should.

Sign up early only if all three of these are true: you need the service for a project starting now, there is no reasonable alternative yet, and you are comfortable running it as it is today, with no new features ever. If any of them is false, start on the alternative instead. A service in maintenance keeps running, but it is a dead end for new work, and the next quarterly announcement could move it into sunset with an end date.

For everything already closed, there is no back door. Accounts are judged by whether they used the service before the cut-off, and a new account is a new customer.

A simple migration plan for small teams

Large companies have migration teams for this. Small ones have one person and a free evening, so here is the short version.

1. List what you use with the check above, and write the end date next to each item. Maintenance items get "no date".
2. Sort by date, not by size. Anything ending in the next 90 days goes first, even if it is small. Pinpoint on October 30 beats a bigger maintenance-only service with no date.
3. Find what the service actually does for you. Jake did not need "Pinpoint"; he needed "a text the day before a booking." Describe the job in one sentence, then pick the replacement that does that job.
4. Export data before the date. End of support usually means the console and resources disappear. Segments, insights, reports and logs you want to keep must be exported first.
5. Test the replacement alongside the old service for at least a week before you switch the old one off.
6. Update the paperwork. Runbooks, onboarding guides and compliance documents should name the new service, so nobody follows old instructions next year.

If this list feels long, it helps to remember that nothing on it is your fault. AWS changed its plans; you are just adjusting to the new map. Most small accounts touch only one or two of these services, and most moves are an afternoon, not a project.

How to see the next round of AWS retirements coming

AWS does not retire services at random times. Over the past year it has announced changes in batches, published in its What's New feed under the title "AWS Service Availability Updates": one in October 2025, then on March 31, June 30 and September 29, 2026. Each batch closes to new customers about a month later. If the pattern holds, the next one lands near the end of the year.

Three places tell you first, without reading every blog post:

• AWS's lifecycle pages in the AWS General Reference, which list every service in maintenance, in sunset with its end date, and in full shutdown. They are the most complete source, and they change when each batch is announced.
• The AWS Health Dashboard for your own account, where account-specific notices about services you actually use appear.
• The What's New feed, where the quarterly "AWS Service Availability Updates" posts appear on the day of announcement.

A calendar reminder in the last week of each quarter, set to check those pages for five minutes, is enough for most small teams. It turns a surprise into a two-month warning.

Lists like this one can feel like a wall of bad news, so here is the reassuring part. Most of the names on it were niche, most accounts touch one or two of them at most, and nearly every one has a clear successor that AWS documents step by step. Jake's reminders now run on a tiny scheduled function, his nephew is doing the course notebooks on his own laptop, and the only thing either of them lost was a Saturday afternoon. If you find a service on this page that you rely on and you are not sure what to do, start with the one-sentence job it does for you. The right replacement usually becomes obvious from there.

Revision note. Written October 6, 2026, the day before five AWS services end. If a service you depend on is on this list, you did nothing wrong by choosing it; plans change, and there is still time to move calmly.