JetBrains is deprecating a load of plugins for IntelliJ IDEA, after coming to the conclusion that while people were using them, they were no longer being actively maintained. It said that as it had established procedures for maintaining a stable-third party API, “we’re confident that moving the plugins out of the main repository will not affect their stability as the IDE evolves” The plugins in question are Struts 1.x and Tiles, JsTestDriver, and J2ME. Further plugins on the hit list in future releases are Tapestry, Google App Engine, Emma code coverage, and Geronimo.

AWS goes large with C5 instances

AWS has expanded its lineup of C5 instances, which are typically used for compute-heavy workloads like batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing, and machine/deep learning inference, amongst other applications. The new additions offer larger virtualized instances, in the shape of 12xlarge, offering 48 logical processors and 96GiB of memory, and 24xlarge, with 96 logical processors and 192GiB. There is also a new bare metal option with 96 logical processors and 192GiB. The new offers run on Intel’s Second Generation Xeon Scalable processors, which include Intel’s Deep Learning Boost.

GitHub tweaks package registry, expands beta

GitHub has made a couple of tweaks to the Package Registry it put into limited beta a month ago. The Microsoft subsidiary said it had changed its delete policy, to avoid breaking projects that depend on a package. So, the registry will no longer support deletion of packages or versions through the GitHub UI or APIs. At the same time it has expanded the beta programme, adding a further 2,000 accounts. GitHub also said it had fixed a number of issues flagged up by the community, and added that it was partnering with Apple to integrate GitHub Package Registry with Swift Package Manager.

Istio says byebye 1.0

Istio has pulled the plug on support for Istio 1.0, following the release of v1.2 of the service mesh this week. The move, which was heralded last month, means no more back-porting of security and critical bug fixes for what was the previous LTS version. As Istio puts it, “We care about you and your clusters, so please be kind to yourself and upgrade.”