The AWS CDK Roadmap lets developers know about our upcoming features and priorities to help them plan how to best leverage the CDK and identify opportunities to contribute to the project. The roadmap provides a high-level view of our work in progress across the aws-cdk, aws-cdk-rfcs, and jsii repositories, and creates an opportunity for customers to engage in a conversation with AWS CDK engineers to give us direct feedback.
The core values for CDK on how to prioritize work, keep engaged with the community and deliver what matters.
- Be transparent
The AWS CDK team’s current work should be easily visible.
- Listen to customers
Allow them to participate in design decisions and to vote on and propose new AWS CDK features. We will periodically re-prioritize the roadmap based on customer feedback.
- Stay up-to-date
Be informed and incorporate best practices.
- Provide the right level of detail
The overview should indicate all work in progress at a glance, while allowing a deep dive into the details via provided references.
- Guide the community
Align on what can be worked on that is not currently handled by the team. Offer help and unblock contributors in their efforts.
Q: How do you manage the roadmap?
A: CDK customers are making decisions and plans based on what we are developing. We strive to provide the required information, when that is not sufficient, we take note of the feedback we receive and iterate on how to bring improvements to our current processes and available information.
Q: How do you mark work in progress?
A: For the aws-cdk repository, any issue that is currently worked on will have the CDK Construct Squad project
listed, with the current status.
- Needs Review - We’re thinking about it, but cannot commit if, or when, we will work on items in this list. This means we are still designing the feature and evaluating how it might work. This is the phase when we collect customer use cases and feedback on how they want to see something implemented. There is no firm commitment to deliver functionality listed in the Needs Review column, and there might be situations where we remove items from the Needs Review column.
- Backlog - We want to do this, but no one has picked it up yet. We have made an implied commitment to work on items in this bucket, they have some level of design spec’ed out. Items might linger in this bucket as we work through the implementation details, or scope stuff out. Think several months out until a developer preview release, give or take.
- In Progress - Someone on the CDK team is actively working on this. If all goes well, issues in this bucket should be released in the coming weeks.
- In review - It’s implementation is done and we are reviewing the code.
- Done - It’s available now, fully supported by AWS.
For the aws-cdk-rfcs, the README file contains the overview and statuses. They can also be checked per RFC by selecting any of the relevant issues and seeing how far along is its Workflow.
Q: How do items on the roadmap move across the project board?
A: The AWS Construct Library module lifecycle document describes how we graduate packages from experimental, to developer preview, to generally available.
Q: Why are there no dates on this roadmap?
A: Security and operational stability are our main priority and we will not ship a feature until these criteria are met, therefore we generally don’t provide specific target dates for releases.
Q: Is every feature on the roadmap?
A: The AWS Cloud Development Kit roadmap provides transparency on our priority for adding new programming languages, developer experience improvements, and service coverage in the AWS Construct Library. The AWS CDK toolkit and AWS Construct Library are such a large surface areas we are intentionally keeping the roadmap at a high-level, so not every CDK feature request will appear on the roadmap. Instead, the roadmap will include a tracking issue for each deliverable that provides a feature overview and contains links to relevant, more granular issues and pull requests. If you want to track the status of a specific issue or pull request, you can do so by monitoring that work item in the aws-cdk GitHub repository.
Q: What is a tracking issue?
A: We create a tracking issue for each CDK feature, AWS Construct Library module, and jsii-supported programming language. Tracking issues provide a brief summary of the feature and a consolidated view of the work scoped for the release. They include links to design documentation, implementation details, and relevant issues. Tracking issues are living documents that start from a basic template and grow more robust over time as we experiment and learn. You can easily find tracking issues by filtering on the management/tracking label.
Q: How can I provide feedback on the roadmap or ask for more information about a feature?
A: Please open an issue! Or engage by 👍 existing ones.
Q: How can I request a feature be added to the roadmap?
A: Please open an issue! Community submitted issues will be tagged “feature-request” and will be reviewed by the team.
Q: Can I “+1” tracking issues and feature requests?
A: We strongly encourage you to do so, as it helps us understand which issues will have the broadest impact. You can navigate to the issue details page and add a reaction. There are six types of reactions (👍 +1, 👎 -1, 😕 confused, ❤️ heart, 👀 watching, 😄 smile, and 🎉 celebration) you can use to help us decide which items will benefit you most.
Q: Will you accept a pull request to the aws-cdk repo?
A: Yes! We take PRs very seriously and will review for inclusion. You can read how to contribute to the CDK here.