Shaping the future of CDK together
January 2, 2025When AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) was announced in 2019, the project introduced a new stage in the evolution of infrastructure as code (IaC), and changed the way customers build on AWS. For those less familiar, CDK is an open source software development framework enabling builders to model and provision their cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. In addition, CDK provides powerful high-level abstractions known as constructs. These constructs allow users to quickly define larger components of their application, with sensible, secure defaults, resulting in more infrastructure with less code.
AWS is committed to the long-term health of CDK, and to the ongoing success of the customers that use it. Today, many AWS customers actively use CDK to manage millions of resources. CDK is also critical to how Amazon development teams provision cloud infrastructure internally. In this next phase of growth and evolution, we envision deeper collaboration between AWS and the community, and more opportunities to contribute code and more to the project. Accordingly, we’re proposing to form a Contributor Council for CDK, to give the community an even greater role in shaping the project’s future. We believe the creation of this open, clearly-defined avenue for information-sharing and feedback-gathering is a vital first step in achieving our vision.
Since the project’s inception, the CDK ecosystem of contributors has grown organically into a large and passionate community, spanning individual developers building for fun to large companies with thousands of developers building at massive scale. In addition to the hundreds of contributors—code, content, and more—there are incredible community groups which have sprung up around the project like the Open Construct Foundation, which organizes CDK Day and manages the cdk.dev Slack.
As we reflect on this journey, the one constant has been our community. The AWS CDK wouldn’t be where it is today without the invaluable feedback, contributions, and collaboration from developers, builders, and organizations across the globe. Because of this, we see opportunities to strengthen our collaboration by bringing the community closer to the project with this Council. To ensure the Council and its Charter serves the CDK community, we’re opening a 30-day period for community input on the Council Charter, which we’ve submitted via the RFC process on the CDK GitHub repository. Following the incorporation of community feedback, we aim to ratify the charter by February 10, 2025, complete Council elections shortly after, and hold our first Council meeting in early March.
In terms of structure, the ten-member Council would bring together equal representation from AWS and the CDK community. The Council will meet monthly, combining town hall discussions about project priorities with dedicated time to review change proposals, RFCs, and the project roadmap. These sessions will be recorded and shared publicly, ensuring transparency for the broader community.
Beyond the Council itself, we’re exploring the formation of special interest working groups focused on areas like expanding community recognition programs, supporting community-led constructs, and organizing CDK-focused events. These working groups can provide additional avenues for community members to partner with AWS to shape the project’s future.
This proposal emerged from months of thoughtful discussions with the community about how to better support the CDK ecosystem, and represents one component of our broader commitment to CDK. In the coming months, we’ll share additional CDK initiatives and investments from AWS. We will also report on the work of this Council.
We’re encouraging everyone to review the full Council charter and share their thoughts through our tracking issue by February 3, 2025, 11:59pm PST. Your input will help ensure the Council serves our community effectively and sets the foundation for a more collaborative future for CDK.
