About
How the quiz works, where its facts come from, and exactly how the two scores are calculated.
Method
Round 1 deals 12 cards from the catalogue: 6 services AWS has put into maintenance, sunset or retired, and 6 that are still open, mixing famous and obscure ones. Round 2 is a list of checkboxes and four questions — self-reported, nothing connects to your account.
All scoring is deterministic code: the same answers always give the same scores. Shared result pages show the scores exactly as they were when you played.
Data sources
The catalogue lists 145 services as of 31 Oct 2026; 145 are verified against an official AWS page (AWS documentation, the AWS service lifecycle pages, or the AWS News Blog). Every lifecycle claim in the quiz links to its source. Services we couldn't source never appear in Round 1 and carry no penalty. Statuses: maintenance = closed to new customers with no end date; sunset = an end date in the future; retired = that date has passed.
Survival Score (0–100)
Start at 100, apply these in order, then clamp to 0–100.
Region posture
| Answer | Points |
|---|---|
| Primary region is us-east-1 | −20 |
| Single region | −15 |
| Backups in another region | −8 |
| Warm standby | 0 |
| Active-active | +10 |
Hidden control-plane dependencies (each counted once)
| Dependency | Points | If mitigated |
|---|---|---|
Global STS endpoint The global STS endpoint sts.amazonaws.com was historically served only from us-east-1. Calls from inside default AWS Regions using Amazon DNS are now served locally, but calls from opt-in Regions, on-premises, laptops or CI outside AWS still go to us-east-1 — and legacy SDKs (CLI v1, boto3, JS v2, Java 1.x) still default to the global endpoint. | −12 | −2 |
Route 53 control plane Route 53's control plane (record and hosted-zone changes) is hosted in us-east-1; public zones can opt into an accelerated-recovery standby in us-west-2 that takes about an hour to kick in. Resolution keeps working, but a failover that relies on a human editing records may be impossible. | −12 | −3 |
IAM control plane IAM is a global service whose control plane is in us-east-1. Existing credentials keep working; creating or changing roles/policies may not. | −6 | — |
Console sign-in and Identity Center The global sign-in endpoint (signin.aws.amazon.com) and the Organizations control plane are in us-east-1. During the Oct-2025 event, IAM users and IAM Identity Center instances homed in us-east-1 could not sign in to fix things. | −8 | −2 |
CloudFront control plane CloudFront configuration, invalidations, ACM certificates for CloudFront, Lambda@Edge and WAF for CloudFront are us-east-1 constructs. Edge serving continues, changes do not. | −6 | — |
Billing and Cost Explorer Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Reports, Data Exports, the Marketplace Catalog and Entitlement APIs and Route 53 domain registration are only offered in us-east-1. No runtime impact — but Marketplace-licensed software activation can be. | −2 | — |
us-east-1 DynamoDB blast radius On 19–20 Oct 2025 a race condition in DynamoDB's DNS automation left the us-east-1 endpoint with an empty DNS record. Over about 14.5 hours it cascaded into EC2 instance launches, Lambda event-source polling, Network Load Balancer health checks, ECS/EKS/Fargate launches, Redshift, Connect and DynamoDB global table replication. Only when your primary region is us-east-1. | −10 | — |
Mitigations: answering “yes” to automated failover softens the Route 53 and console dependencies; “yes” to regional STS endpoints softens the STS one. “Don't know” counts as no.
Bonuses
| Answer | Points |
|---|---|
| Fail over without a human in the console | +5 |
| SDKs use STS regional endpoints | +3 |
Tiers
| Score | Tier | Headline |
|---|---|---|
| 85–100 | Bunker | You'd sleep through it. |
| 65–84 | Sandbagged | You'd be wet but alive. |
| 40–64 | Exposed | Multi-AZ is not multi-region. |
| 0–39 | Toast | Same blast radius as Slack in Oct 2025. |
Lifecycle Risk (0–100)
Points for each service you ticked: sunset 30, retired 30, maintenance 15, and 5 for an active service with deprecated features inside it. Summed and capped at 100. Higher is worse.
| Score | Tier | Headline |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Evergreen | Nothing on the chopping block. |
| 1–20 | Pruning needed | A deprecated feature or two — plan a sprint. |
| 21–50 | Deprecation debt | At least one service AWS has already frozen. |
| 51–100 | Borrowed time | You are building on services that are closed to new customers. |
AWS retirement waves so far
Verified services grouped by the month AWS first announced (or, failing that, dated) the change.
Jun 202610 services
- Amazon Bedrock Agents (Classic) MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Jul 2026. Successor: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Source
- Amazon Kendra MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Jul 2026. Successor: Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. Source
- Amazon Q Business MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Jul 2026. Successor: Amazon Quick. Source
- AWS Managed Services (AMS) Advanced SunsetEnd of support 30 Jun 2027. Successor: AMS Accelerate. Source
- AWS re:Post Private SunsetEnd of support 30 Jun 2027. Source
- SageMaker Clarify MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Jul 2026. Source
- SageMaker Debugger MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Jul 2026. Source
- SageMaker Ground Truth MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Jul 2026. Source
- SageMaker Model Monitor MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Jul 2026. Source
- SageMaker Profiler SunsetEnd of support 30 Jun 2027. Source
May 20261 service
- AWS Panorama RetiredReached end of support 20 May 2026. Source
Apr 20261 service
- Amazon Q Developer SunsetEnd of support 30 Apr 2027. Successor: Kiro. Source
Mar 20268 services
- Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle SunsetEnd of support 31 Mar 2027. Successor: Self-managed Oracle on Amazon EC2. Source
- Amazon WorkMail SunsetEnd of support 31 Mar 2027. Source
- Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client SunsetEnd of support 31 Mar 2027. Source
- AWS App Runner MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Apr 2026. Successor: Amazon ECS Express Mode. Source
- AWS Audit Manager MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Apr 2026. Successor: AWS Config conformance packs. Source
- AWS CloudTrail Lake MaintenanceClosed to new customers 31 May 2026. Successor: Amazon CloudWatch. Source
- AWS IoT FleetWise MaintenanceClosed to new customers 30 Apr 2026. Source
- AWS Service Management Connector SunsetEnd of support 31 Mar 2027. Source
Dec 20251 service
- AWS DeepRacer RetiredReached end of support 15 Dec 2025. Successor: DeepRacer on AWS (open-source solution). Source
Oct 20256 services
- Amazon CodeCatalyst MaintenanceClosed to new customers 7 Nov 2025. Source
- Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer MaintenanceClosed to new customers 7 Nov 2025. Successor: Amazon Inspector code security. Source
- Amazon Lookout for Equipment RetiredReached end of support 7 Oct 2026. Successor: AWS IoT SiteWise anomaly detection. Source
- AWS Migration Hub MaintenanceClosed to new customers 7 Nov 2025. Source
- AWS Proton RetiredReached end of support 7 Oct 2026. Source
- Kinesis Data Analytics for SQL RetiredReached end of support 27 Jan 2026. Successor: Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. Source
Jul 20251 service
- Amazon QLDB RetiredReached end of support 31 Jul 2025. Source
May 20256 services
- Amazon Inspector Classic RetiredReached end of support 20 May 2026. Successor: Amazon Inspector. Source
- Amazon Pinpoint RetiredReached end of support 30 Oct 2026. Successor: Amazon Connect + AWS End User Messaging. Source
- Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics MaintenanceClosed to new customers 20 Jun 2025. Successor: Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB. Source
- AWS IoT Analytics RetiredReached end of support 15 Dec 2025. Source
- AWS IoT Events RetiredReached end of support 20 May 2026. Source
- AWS Private 5G RetiredReached end of support 20 May 2025. Source
Apr 20251 service
- Amazon WorkDocs RetiredReached end of support 25 Apr 2025. Source
Feb 20251 service
- Amazon Chime (app) RetiredReached end of support 20 Feb 2026. Source
Nov 20243 services
- Amazon Elastic Transcoder RetiredReached end of support 13 Nov 2025. Successor: AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Source
- AWS Elemental MediaStore RetiredReached end of support 13 Nov 2025. Successor: Amazon S3 / AWS Elemental MediaPackage. Source
- AWS Snowcone RetiredReached end of support 12 Nov 2025. Successor: AWS DataSync / AWS Data Transfer Terminal. Source
Oct 20242 services
Sep 20241 service
- AWS App Mesh RetiredReached end of support 30 Sep 2026. Successor: Amazon ECS Service Connect. Source
Jul 20246 services
- Amazon CloudSearch MaintenanceClosed to new customers 25 Jul 2024. Successor: Amazon OpenSearch Service. Source
- Amazon Forecast MaintenanceClosed to new customers 29 Jul 2024. Successor: Amazon SageMaker Canvas. Source
- Amazon S3 Select MaintenanceClosed to new customers 25 Jul 2024. Successor: Amazon Athena. Source
- AWS Cloud9 MaintenanceClosed to new customers 25 Jul 2024. Successor: AWS IDE Toolkits / AWS CloudShell. Source
- AWS CodeStar RetiredReached end of support 25 Jul 2024. Source
- AWS Data Pipeline MaintenanceClosed to new customers 25 Jul 2024. Successor: AWS Glue / Step Functions / Amazon MWAA. Source
May 20241 service
- AWS OpsWorks Stacks RetiredReached end of support 26 May 2024. Source
Mar 20241 service
- AWS Snowmobile RetiredReached end of support 14 Mar 2024. Source
Feb 20241 service
- Amazon Honeycode RetiredReached end of support 29 Feb 2024. Source
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