I got tired of AWS plugins dying on IDE update day, so I wrote my own
Every couple of months I'd update my IDE and the AWS tooling would be greyed out. Always on the morning I needed to read a log. I finally sat down to figure out why, and it's dumber than I expected - it's one field.
Plugins declare until-build in the manifest. It's a ceiling, and the IDE just refuses to load anything past it. Nothing crashed, nothing is corrupt, reinstalling doesn't help because the fresh copy says the same thing. You can check any plugin without installing it - hit /api/plugins/11349/updates?size=3 on plugins.jetbrains.com, that's the AWS Toolkit.
When I ran it: 261.0 to 261.*, 253.0 to 253.*, 262.0 to 262.*. One build line per release, so every IDE update is a coin flip on whether the matching plugin build shipped yet.
To be fair, if you hook deep into IDE internals a ceiling is the responsible call - loading into an IDE where the API moved just hands users a stack trace. But I only wanted to read logs and list buckets, and that doesn't need internals.
So I wrote small ones that leave until-build empty, which forces me to stay on stable platform API. Four for AWS (CloudWatch logs, S3, CloudFormation deploys, Step Functions executions) and one for Azure Blob. Each does one service and nothing else - a small surface is the only reason "still works next month" is a promise I can actually keep. They're read-only by design: nothing deletes, nothing writes.
The Azure one ships with zero third-party dependencies, one 72,643-byte jar. I wrote the Shared Key signing by hand rather than pull in the SDK and its Netty/Reactor/Jackson tail. Took a day longer than it should have - the canonical string has eleven blank lines in the middle of it and a wrong one gets you a 403 with no hint.
Being upfront since this is my own stuff: browsing and reading are free, a couple of extras (live tail, favorites) are $3/mo with a 30-day trial. Marketplace search for "CloudWatch" or "Azure Blob" finds them under sellerkit.
Mostly posting because the until-build thing took me way too long to work out and I suspect I'm not the only one who's lost a morning to it.