2020 is finally wrapped up. Another quarter, another CDK community survey!

This quarter saw 114 responses! Thank you all for participating and beating the goal of last quarter's 105 responses.

Organization Size

Q3 responses are on the left, Q4 responses on the right:

The 2-5 size orgs took the biggest hit in usage. I think this is more of an increase in large org usage then likely an actual decrease in small org usage.

The 6-50 person team increase is also encouraging to see as it means organizations are adopting wider in their orgs.

Experience

The experience of respondents continues to shift towards the 4/5s. Everyone is getting more confident with the CDK!

Previous Infrastructure as Code Experience

Still not much of a shift here. Most respondents are coming from some IaC background.

Construct Usage

Another quarter of increased custom construct development. This is a great trend to see. Also seeing the 3rd party construct usage increasing.

Abstractions

Wow, almost the exact same numbers.

CICD and automation

Pipelines usage is up, probably thanks to the wonderful CDK Pipelines module which makes it super easy to get your CICD pipeline for your CDK code running smoothly.

Additionally, it seems people are moving away from using 'deploy' and using 'synth' with standard CloudFormation calls.

Kubernetes

No significant changes on the kubernetes front. It appears there is a lot of room to grow the community in the k8s world.

Continued Use

I'm counting some of those slivers as a 'yes'. No big changes here.

Bootstrapping (new question)

I wanted to see how people were bootstrapping new CDK projects. Using the CLI is probably the first choice but with the release of projen I was curious to see where the community was moving. Was surprised to see some of the other options respondents dropped, like cruft and some custom tooling.

Language Choice (new question)

Typescript seemed like the most common, but I thought it was worth checking to see how far Python was coming along.

Construct Catalog (new question)

Getting the Construct Catalog up to speed and useful is going to be a big push in 2021.

Help (new question)

So, where are people going for help? Reference docs are the start. Hopefully they're working well for everyone. Google coming in second place isn't a big shock. But, I was hoping the cdk.dev Slack server was a little higher usage. We've got some idea on how to make it a more useful technical resource for the community. If you'd like to help with that, please check out the #cdk-dev-website Slack channel on the server. Some other interesting resources:

• The excellent CDK Patterns
• @alexcasalboni
• Projects that use the CDK on Github
• The CDK Github Issues and source code

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey. This is the 3rd community survey, and it's fun watching the trends move. 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!