Why Did boto3 Downloads for Python 3.9 Suddenly Surge in Spring 2025?
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MellowCedar42
Looking at download statistics for boto3 by Python minor version, I noticed that Python 3.9 downloads jumped from roughly 10–20 million per day to around 60–80 million in late March or early April 2025. The increase happened almost overnight and has remained elevated, while downloads for other Python versions stayed relatively flat. Has AWS or another official source explained the change? Could a large-scale CI/CD, AWS Glue, or managed-runtime migration be responsible?
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Runtime end-of-life is probably part of the story, but Python 3.8 reaching its end of support earlier doesn’t line up neatly with the spring 2025 spike. Amazon Linux or another AWS-managed runtime change could have pushed a particularly large group of builds onto Python 3.9, so the best confirmation would come from AWS announcements or package-download telemetry from affected organizations.
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Another possibility is dependency resolution after boto3 changed its supported Python versions. If newer releases stopped supporting older interpreters, Python 3.9 environments could have started repeatedly downloading the newest boto3 version still compatible with 3.9. The timing makes this worth checking against boto3 release metadata and pip download logs, though it doesn’t by itself prove that was the cause.
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A likely explanation is a managed AWS service moving customers onto—or requiring updates for—a Python 3.9 runtime. AWS Glue uses Python 3.9 in some configurations, and teams may have had to rebuild scripts and refresh dependencies when support or runtime behavior changed. That kind of coordinated migration could create a large, persistent download increase.
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SilverMaple63: This would also fit organizations that pin Python versions differently across workloads. For example, shell-based jobs may still run on 3.9 while Spark jobs use 3.11, forcing shared tooling to remain compatible with 3.9.