Round-up: AWS MAPs to Windows, Crystal clarity, Spring cools on Solr, Chef cuts off s390x

Round-up: AWS MAPs to Windows, Crystal clarity, Spring cools on Solr, Chef cuts off s390x

AWS has announced its Migration Acceleration Program for Windows has now reached general availability. The service, first announced at re:Invent in November, bundles “services, best practices, and tools to help our customers save costs, accelerate their migrations and modernize their Windows workloads on AWS”. Or put another, it helps them NOT run on Azure. The service relies heavily on partners, including the likes of (Microsoft certified) Accenture and Rackspace, to lick customers’ Windows workloads into shape before they are lifted onto AWS.

Crystal comes into focus

The team behind the Crystal programming language has shipped v0.34.0, which delivers some of the “final touches” before it hits full 1.0 status. The team aim to produce a language with “Ruby’s efficiency for writing code” and “C’s efficiency for running code”. A blog post by team member Brian Cardiff said the new release brought “a better exception hierarchy to replace Errno, a new logging module, cleanups and fixes aiming for a better, more stable release”.

Spring sunsets on Solr

Spring has announced that it is dropping Spring Data support for the open-source enterprise-search platform Apache Solr. While originally the Apache Solr module was a core project, community interest, feature requests, and bug reports have apparently declined, meaning there had only been occasional updates and fixes for the last few years. The module will get updates and fixes for the next year, while the project looks for volunteers to continue maintaining it. If volunteers are not found, “we will move the project into the attic.”

Chef washes hands of s390x

Also for the chop is the Chef Infra Client for Linux on the IBM s390x architecture. Builds for the venerable mainframe platform – which was succeeded by the z/Architecture a mere 20 years ago – will be deprecated on June 30th, 2020 and support for the architecture will reach end-of-life status on December 31st, 2020. The config management firm said the upcoming release of Chef Infra Client 16 will not be compatible with s390x architecture, but v15 will support critical bug and CVE fixes for s390x till the end of this year.