Amazon’s long lived ECS 3.0 will be shutting down soon. This was an early version of their API that allowed 3rd party applications to access Amazon’s vast database of books and products. It was very widely used, and it will be interesting to see what kind of impact it has when they turn it off for good on March 31st. I’m sure there are plenty of small sites that will break in some way when they turn it off.
From what I’ve seen, they have been pretty good at notifying customers who are still using it. I’ve gotten several emails about it in the past couple weeks. Despite all of their efforts, though, I’m sure that there has got to be all kinds of small sites that were written at one point and haven’t been touched since.
The easiest way to tell if you have a site that uses it, is to grep through all of your code for ‘AssociateTag’ or ‘SubscriptionId’. Those are the authentication parameters used by the 3.0 version that it shutting down. The newer version of ECS uses a ‘AWSAccessKeyId’ parameter instead.
If you have a PHP or Perl-based website that needs to be upgraded to the new version, you can hire me to fix it.