2024.06 Release Notes Notes

We sent this note to customers along with the 2024.06 release:

Announcement: After four years, Substrate 2024.06 marks the beginning of Substrate’s transition into maintenance mode. Travis and I have tried everything we can to build a sustainable business on developing and supporting Substrate but, despite a few customers like you who saw how important it is to get isolation in AWS right from the beginning, we failed to find a scalable sales and marketing story.

Substrate was designed from the very first to never leave anyone up a creek without a paddle and we don’t intend to start now. We’d love to meet with you soon to compare notes and make sure we’re supporting you as best we can and in whatever direction you want to go. As a reminder, every Substrate release comes with its source code and the license has always given you the right to change it as you see fit.

The 2024.06 release has moved the beginning of Substrate’s long-theorized integration with AWS IAM Identity Center out from behind a feature flag which means now when you run substrate setup it will look for an instance of IAM Identity Center. If it doesn’t find one, it’ll offer you a quick way to create one (which you have to do in the AWS Console because there’s no API for this). If it finds one, it will manage permission sets for Administrator and Auditor, the first step in helping you recreate the kinds of access Substrate has always helped you manage. The next couple of Substrate releases will expand upon this in order to offer you an easy (and optional) path to embracing IAM Identity Center when and if you want to.

We have already terminated everyone’s automatic invoicing and payment so you won’t be charged again for Substrate.

Finally, thanks for buying into our vision for how to use AWS. We hope it’s serving you well even if it didn’t make for a sustainable business for us.

In order to continue to meet our goal of never sending a Substrate customer back to step zero if they decide to stop using it, this release began the process of integrating with AWS IAM Identity Center. The first step, included in this release, is simply to manage permission sets that match the Administrator and Auditor roles that Substrate has managed since the very beginning.

The remaining Substrate releases will pave the rest of a path into the future for folks to take whenever they’re ready.

For my part, now that we’ve decided we’re done, I’m ready to be done and move onto the next thing. I’m comfortable with this business failing because I don’t base my entire identity on being an entrepreneur.