AWS Shifts Strategy: Public GitHub Documentation to Be Retired
InfoQ Homepage News AWS Shifts Strategy: Public GitHub Documentation to Be Retired
In the next few days, AWS will start retiring the AWS documentation currently available on GitHub. After reviewing the results of the project and considering the overhead of manually keeping the internal documentation in sync, the cloud provider recently decided to retire most of its public repositories.
Created to increase openness and collaboration, the open-source documentation never gained popularity with the AWS community, with developers lamenting that pull requests were often ignored. Jeff Barr, vice president and chief evangelist at AWS, explains the change:
The primary source for most of the AWS documentation is on internal systems that we had to manually sync with the GitHub repos. Despite the best efforts of our documentation team, keeping the public repos in sync with our internal ones has proven to be very difficult and time-consuming, with several manual steps and some parallel editing (...) the overhead was very high and actually consumed precious time that could have been put to use in ways that more directly improved the quality of the documentation.
Not every repository will be retired, with the ones containing code samples, sample apps, CloudFormation templates, configuration files, and other supplementary resources remaining as primary sources.
