My colleague Angela Chapman wrote the guest post below to make you aware of longer instance, reservation, volume, and snapshot IDs that we will be rolling out in 2016.

– Jeff;

EC2 and EBS are planning to increase the length of some of their resource IDs over the coming year. In 2016, we will be introducing longer IDs for instances, reservations, volumes, and snapshots. You will have until the end of next year to opt-in to receiving the longer IDs, and the switch-over will not impact most customers. However, we wanted to make you aware of these upcoming changes so you can schedule time in 2016 to test your systems with these longer IDs.

We need to do this given how fast AWS is continuing to grow; we will start to run low on IDs for certain EC2 and EBS resources within a year or so. In order to enable the long-term, uninterrupted creation of new instances, reservations, volumes, and snapshots, we will need to introduce a longer ID format for these resources. The new IDs will be the same format as existing IDs, but longer. The current ID format is a resource identifier followed by an 8-character string, and the new format will be the same resource identifier followed by a 17-character string.

The vast majority of our customers will not be impacted by this change. Only systems that parse or store resource IDs might be impacted. For those impacted, you can continue using the existing 8-character IDs for your existing resources; these will not change and will continue to be supported. Only new resources after you opt in to the new format will receive the 17-character IDs. The SDKs are already compatible with longer IDs and don’t require any updates.

We’ll enable you to opt in to receiving longer IDs over a transition period that starts in January and will last through December 2016. Until December 2016, use of longer IDs will be optional. After December 2016, about 13 months from now, all new instances, volumes, reservations, and snapshots will start to receive the longer IDs.

The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, and AWS SDKs are already compatible with longer resource IDs and do not need to be updated to support the longer ID format. We will be introducing new APIs to manage the opt-in process.

Additional information, including a detailed timeline and FAQs, can be found here. If you have any questions, you can contact the AWS support team on the community forums and via AWS Premium Support.

— Angela Chapman, Senior Product Manager