The AWS open source newsletter - review of 2022

I wanted to kick off 2023 by sharing some data points and things of interest that came up in 2022 as part of writing and putting together this open source newsletter. Given the nature of the newsletter, and that transparency and openness is core to open source, I hope these might be interesting to some of you.

In 2022, I published 45 newsletters over the course of the year. These were enjoyed (I hope) by over 100K readers from across the world and clicked on an average of five of the posts I share each week. I actually post across two sites, dev.to and my personal blog. Readers came from all over the world, with over 110 countries accessing the newsletter. The top five countries where U.S.A, India, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany.

Over 150K words were written, with nearly 3K (2920) open source related articles shared across code, blog posts, videos, and more. We featured over a thousand authors (actual number is 1211), including many first time authors, AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders, and the broader AWS and open source community. See below for the top ten posts of 2022.

In 2022, the newsletter introduced you to 931 new open source projects (with 187K clicks throughs) so I hope you were able to check and use a few of these. See below for the top 15 projects.

I transitioned to using Hugo to build my personal blog, and introduced tagging as a way of being able to better find the favourite open source technologies you like. Over 200 different tags were used to cover the various open source projects.

Most viewed projects

What were the most popular projects that readers found interesting in this newsletter? I thought I would share what have been the most popular projects this year (measured by folks that have clicked on the links). These are just too good to miss, so check this list out and let me know what you think. What were your favourite projects of 2022? What is missing that you are surprised about?

• querypal the most viewed project, provides a nice WebUI for Amazon Athena
• cfn-diagram is CLI tool to visualise CloudFormation/SAM/CDK stacks as visjs networks, draw.io or ascii-art diagrams
• driftctl helps you detect, track and alert on infrastructure drift
• infracost shows cloud cost estimates for Terraform
• aws-sdk-client-mock provides AWS JavaScript SDK v3 mocks for easy unit testing
• cfn_nag is a linting tool for CloudFormation templates
• steampipe ise SQL to instantly query AWS resources across regions and accounts
• keycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management solution
• gnuradio is a free & open-source software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios
• eventcatalog helps you discover, explore and document your Event Driven Architectures powered by Markdown.
• ddb_local provides a Python wrapper for DynamoDB Local
• cloudquery-policies/aws is an open-source cloud asset inventory powered by SQL
• kronicle is an open source tool and dashboard for documenting and visualising a tech stack
• memq is an efficient, scalable cloud native PubSub system from Pintrest

Most viewed blog posts and articles

It was not just code that readers were interested in. Here is a list of the most viewed blog posts of 2022. If you missed them the first time around, here is your chance to catch up.

• Presto® on Apache Kafka® At Uber Scale
• Dashboards as Code with HCL + SQL
• The Art of Building Open Data Lakes with Apache Hudi, Kafka, Hive, and Debezium
• Monitor AWS resources created by Terraform in Amazon DevOps Guru using tfdevops
• Progressive Delivery using AWS App Mesh and Flagger
• Parallel CDK stack deployments with GitHub Actions
• Use CDK8S To Create AWS Controllers for Kubernetes Custom Resources
• How Prime Video updates its app for more than 8,000 device types
• First Look at Lambda Powertools TypeScript
• AWS CDK v2 Tutorial – How to Create a Three-Tier Serverless Application

Feedback and looking forward to 2023

Thanks for reading this short post to recap 2022. As I look forward to 2023, I am thinking about what themes to cover, what open source technologies to focus on, and ensure that I work back from our customers.

To help I have a very short survey that I would like you to complete. The survey link is here, and completing the survey will give you the chance to win some SWAG in the Raffle. After completing the survey, you will get a Raffle ticket code. Please ignore the link below this saying you can redeem this in the AWS Console. These are not AWS Credit codes.

KEEP THE CODE SAVED

I will publish the winning code in a future edition of the AWS Open Source newsletter.