Improving Transparency of AWS Elastic Beanstalk

This post is courtesy of David LaBissoniere, Software Development Manager, AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Today I want to discuss two recent announcements from the AWS Elastic Beanstalk team which improve transparency into our planning and development. We launched a new public roadmap, and we shifted to developing the Elastic Beanstalk command line interface (EB CLI) on GitHub as a community-involved open source project.

Public Roadmap

In January, we launched an experimental public roadmap on GitHub, joining other teams like AWS container services, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS App Mesh. The roadmap allows us to be more transparent about our priorities, and enables you to directly influence them. You can propose a feature by opening a GitHub issue, or comment on existing issues. 2020 is shaping up to be a significant year for us, and as we continue to invest in the service, we want customer input to help direct our focus.

The roadmap itself is built as a GitHub project board and contains five columns:

Just Shipped — Launched and available for production use.
Public Beta — Available in a preview form but not yet recommended for production usage.
Coming Soon — Launching soon, generally within the next one to three months.
We’re Working On It — In progress, but further out.
Researching — We’re interested in this feature but are still thinking about the best way to implement it.

Please feel free to create a GitHub issue for a feature you want us to support, or give a thumbs-up to existing issues. We’d also love to hear from you in the issue comments about how you’d like to use a particular feature or how you think it should work. While the roadmap doesn’t include every single item we are working on, it does include many of the regular incremental launches customers rely on, for example, new platform runtime updates like PHP 7.3 or .NET Core 3.1. We’re starting out with a subset of our planned and in-flight work, and expect to gradually expand our use of the roadmap over the course of the year.

EB CLI on GitHub

A popular way to use Elastic Beanstalk is our command line interface, the EB CLI. As of January 16, it is hosted on GitHub as an Apache 2.0-licensed open source project. We plan to do nearly all of our CLI development openly on GitHub and welcome pull requests from the community. Many customers rely on the EB CLI as part of their development and deployment workflows. We hope to improve transparency into this critical tool by open-sourcing it, and we also hope you join us in improving it.

We’re thrilled to start off the year with these two announcements. Watch the roadmap for more announcements in this space!