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

2021 responses are on the left, 2022 responses on the right:

Overall the small team size grew a bit, from ~25% to ~37%, while adoption in small businesses grew.

Experience

Looks like we've shifted right, more people are more comfortable and experienced, which is exactly how we want to see this go!

Bootstrapping

We're actually seeing a little reduction in the projen usage. Disappointing, I'll be honest. I love projen and find it a great way to manage projects so I was hoping to see this go up a little bit, but perhaps that means we just need to create more content around projen!

Previous Infrastructure as Code Experience

Looks like there are more Terraform converts amoung us!

Construct Usage

A slight increase in the 3rd party constructs but not much change otherwise.

Construct Hub

The Construct Hub has made a big splash and is much more useful than the old Construct Catalog, so glad to see it's getting the recognition it deserves!

CICD and automation

I removed the second question because I felt it was a bit redundant. Otherwise, no big shifts here.

Kubernetes

A pretty decent increase in Kubernetes usage. Wasn't expecting that...

Lambdas/Serverless

This is a new question for this year, so nothing from last year to compare it to.

I wasn't expecting the serverless usage to be so high. Also interesting to see that Lambdas are, almost 3/4 of the time, being written in the same language. I was guessing it'd be higher. I wonder for those who aren't if they're because ownership of the code is split between teams.

Continued Use

No significant change here. Those who love the CDK are continuing to use it!

Language Choice

Python is seeing a little loss in favor of some other languages (mostly Java-based).

Help

Looks like the docs are the favorite place to start, and I agree. I'm always heading to the docs.

Background

Another new question for 2022. I had been having conversations with various people about their background and wanted to know if people were coming from more of a DevOps background or Developer background. My guess was that it was heavily DevOps and that Developers hadn't really embraced the CDK yet. Boy, was I wrong!

Pull Request Submissions

Another new question for 2022. The AWS CDK is an open source project, so I was curious how many people had actually submitted PRs. It was actually a higher number than I was expecting. I also asked a few follow-up questions which are harder to share with a picture, so I'll summarize here.

Seems that one of the reasons why PR submissions are low is that there is a high barrier to entry as well as a slow process for reviewing and accepting. A few specific comments included "takes forever", "process is lengthy", and "I'm not good enough". There is a clear need right now to make the process more friendly and reduce the barrier to entry. Only about a 1/3rd of the respondents said they were satisfied with the PR submission process.

Issues

Another new question for 2022. I wanted to know how much open issues/bugs were causing problems for people.

Apparently not a lot, although 1/3rd of people said they did have blocking issues. Perhaps if we can get the PR submission process streamlined we can see more contributions from the community and people can be unblocked sooner!

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey. This is the 5th 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!