CDK Community Survey - 2023
It's been a while since the last survey. I felt once a quarter was too much and there wasn't a significant change in results, so now it's been a year since the last survey so let's see what's changed!
Organization Size
2022 responses are on the left, 2023 responses on the right:
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
Large team growth has increased, accounting for over 1/2 of the entire respondents. Fewer people are using the CDK in isolation and more are using it in teams.
Experience
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
There has been a big shift towards more advanced knowledge. This is a great thing, or just people are getting overconfident =-}.
Bootstrapping
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
Not much of a shift here.
Previous Infrastructure as Code Experience
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
No significant change here either.
Construct Usage
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
A slight increase in the 3rd party constructs usage. A bigger response "we don't want to create reusable constructs" which is a bit of a surprise. I'd love to hear some feedback on why you wouldn't want to.
Construct Hub
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
Wow, no change. There are still about 40% of people who don't use it.
CICD and automation
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
CodePipeline is dropping and more people are using GitHub Actions. There is also a drop in manual deploy which is great.
Kubernetes
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
A drop in kubernetes usage. Not surprising, it seems like the AWS community generally shies away from k8s.
Lambdas/Serverless
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
No real significant shift in the serverless usage but an increase in using the same language for Lambda handlers is a bit surprising. I would have expected, as people got more familiar with the CDK, to embrace picking a different language for specific needs.
Continued Use
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
It may not look like it, but when combining the two "yes" answers, there is an increase in continued usage.
Language Choice
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 | |
I closed down the "other" option this year, so there is a big drop in that. TypeScript is still the clear winner, but Python is seeing an increase in usage.
Help
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
The docs are still the place to start with ChatGPT obviously seeing increase from last year (cause it didn't exist). Will be very curious to see where this goes next year. Secondary choices see a drop in our cdk.dev Slack server (sad) in favor of ChatGPT.
Background
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
No real shift here.
Pull Request Submissions
I expanded on the question here to see if people liked the PR submission process.
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
Fewer people have submitted and about half didn't like the process.
Issues
| 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|
 |  |
No significant change here. Open issues block about the same amount of people are previous years. Was hoping to see this number go down. Hopefully next year...
Conclusion
Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey. This is the 6th community survey, and it's fun watching the trends move, even if slowly. If you have suggestions on what questions should be in this survey, or other comments in general about it, please feel free to drop my a line on the cdk.dev Slack Server or on Twitter. Happy constructing!