I had a surprise today - I can no longer create
dc2.large clusters, and the date that it was no longer
possible to create clusters was in fact the date AWS sent the email
telling me this.
So, I had thought that retirement was in mid-2026.
I’ve spent some time now trying to figure out what happened.
AWS sent an email on 2025-05-15 (May 15th), title is;
[Action Required] Amazon Redshift Dense Compute (DC2) Node Type End-of-Life - April 24, 2026
Okay - dc2 going away mid-2026. That’s up-front, center and clear.
Email opens with;
[Starting September 15, 2025, emails about AWS Health events will be delivered via the AWS User Notifications service. You can opt-in to this enhanced experience today. See footer for details.]
Which is irrelevant and has consumed from the limited attention budget I have for AWS emails, where they’re mainly content telling you how amazing AWS products are. I could say it’s the email version of the distractions/advertising built into the AWS console, where it keeps throwing irrelevant stuff at you (which sometimes will be when you’re working on delicate, critical and potentially very expensive tasks).
Then we get this;
Amazon Redshift Dense Compute (DC2) nodes will reach end-of-life on April 24, 2026. We recommend upgrading your Amazon Redshift DC2 clusters to Amazon Redshift RA3 or Amazon Redshift Serverless to access the latest benefits and innovations of Amazon Redshift Managed Storage (RMS), including independent compute and storage scaling, data sharing, write operations for concurrency scaling, Zero-ETL, and Multi-AZ capabilities.
Okay - dc2 going away mid-2026. That’s up-front, center and clear.
Fine, all clear - and the rest of the email is very long - links to AWS doc pages about their products (“upgrade to RA3!”, “use Serverless!”, “where can I check if I have DC2 clusters?”, etc, etc, etc). I skip it; this is all secondary and/or trivial stuff.
Today, I can’t make clusters.
Wat?
In fact I see now I look for it the start of the next and very long paragraph is this;
After May 15, 2025, you will no longer be able to create new clusters, resize existing ones, or add nodes to current Amazon Redshift DC2 clusters.
Okay - dc2 going away mid-2026. That’s up-front, center and clear… wait, what??!
And in fact the date I can no longer make new clusters is…
…the date this email was sent??
You see by then I’d been told twice EOL is mid-April, at which point I’m now scanning the email to judge if there’s anything else in there - it’s a very, very long email, and it all looks like secondary stuff. I looked at the third paragraph, but I looked at its center, to get a sense of what it was about, and it’s stuff about upgrades and RA3 credits and RI instances.
To my eye, it’s a example of how not to write an email. It reminds me a bit of the interminable audio warnings on British trains before the start. You get literally ten minutes of message after message telling you to watch out for this, be careful about that, check the other. When you give a great deal of information, and it’s almost all noise, people switch off. Do not embed critical information in that mass of noise.
As an aside, before I remembered I received this via email, I Googled
a bunch to find this information. Far as I can tell, it’s not published
- the only place I found it was a reply to a repost.aws post, where a
user is asking why he can no longer create dc2
clusters.
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