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I don't really understand what does AWS service preview mean. I have seen in AWS announcements, that the Redshift Serverless was released, but it is currently in a preview mode. In AWS Service Terms I have found that SLA does not apply to the service previews. So, my questions:

  1. Are there any other limitations?
  2. Can it happen, that they this service will just disappear after some time?
  3. Are there any available timelines from AWS when this service will become generally available?

Thank you!

John Rotenstein
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Oleksii Nikulin
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2 Answers2

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I'm not aware of a formal definition of 'Preview' and it may vary from service to service.

Here is what I think it means, broadly:

  • don't use a preview for production workloads
  • APIs may change
  • documentation may be incomplete
  • features may change, be added, or be removed

I suppose it's theoretically possible that a Preview service might be withdrawn but it seems highly unlikely to me that this would happen.

AWS services do not typically indicate a date when they expect the service to move out of Preview and into General Availability.

jarmod
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Having to work hands-on in a project that was designed to go to production using a service in preview mode, specifically the one you mentioned: Redshift serverless, I can let you know of the stories that I had to go through.

It is correct that these services do not have the SLAs of regular service, you can check Beta and Preview service terms here: aws service-terms

These include scary things like:

"(a) you will not have any further right to access or use the applicable Beta Service or Beta Region, and (b) Your Content used in the applicable Beta Service or Beta Region may be deleted or inaccessible."

In my experience I got very prompt from support when I faced the many issues that appeared.

For most of the part the biggest issue so far was that AWS kept modifying the service, sometimes weekly. This ment that the console changed, the parameters changed, the options changed. It also meant that a cluster that was working stopped been available because an option that did not exist before was now mandatory.

We planned to mitigate this by moving the serverless cluster to a provisioned cluster. At first the option did not exist, even if it was documented. Support could not give us a date and actually removed that part of the documentation.

Then, in a new release, the option appeared and we did some successfull tests. The following week when we planned to migrate everything, the option was still there but it did not work. The response from support was that it was no longer available and no date planned.

At the time of writing it is still in preview mode and cannot create a provisioned cluster from a serveless snapshot. So we are planning to recreate in a provisioned cluster and move the data.

So, the take on this is not to use or plan to use a service in preview mode for production.

gabriel capparelli
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