Ready for Lift Off: The Community-Driven Future of Runway

Introduction

In 2018, a small, but determined company decided to build a tool that would transform how cloud infrastructure was managed for its customers. That company was Onica and that tool was Runway. To this day, Runway is an integral part of many Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployment pipelines and processes. 

Runway simplifies complex deployments that combine various technologies, such as the Serverless Framework and Terraform by HashiCorp, across multiple regions and accounts with ease. As a result, it’s the answer to a common problem many cloud services providers face when trying to incorporate the many different technology stacks that customers demand, with the scalability, simplicity and speed that customers expect. Providing a common entry point for complex deployments meant full stack deployments were only a single command away and it addressed many limitations of existing cloud-native deployment tools at the time.

In its early days, Runway supported the core cloud technologies typically found in cloud engineers’ toolbox, such as AWS CloudFormation, Terraform and the Serverless Framework. Runway evolved and support was introduced for many commonly used cloud technologies, such as AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), Kubernetes® and static sites hosted on Amazon S3. This created a tool that was extremely powerful and capable, but also greatly increased the maintenance demands. Rackspace Technology® acquired Onica in 2020 which resulted in Runway being held in mostly maintenance mode, given the solid foundation of the project.

Today, we are excited to announce that we are working on the next major release of Runway. The most recent minor release included a critical upgrade of Pydantic, which resulted in the end-of-life for npm releases and binary builds. Rest assured, the project is alive, and we want to hear from the community about what you would like to see included in future releases. We have a couple of items that we are planning to deliver‚ but would appreciate any feedback here.

First, we plan to remove Kubernetes support from the tool. The Kubernetes landscape changes frequently and, although it may have made sense to include Kubernetes support originally, there are a multitude of tools that are purpose-built for Kubernetes deployments.

Second, in the spirit of keeping the tool lean, we feel it’s best to remove authentication support OOTB for static website deployments. While it’s handy to be able to spin up a quick static website or jumpstart your frontend project, devising an authentication and authorization model is best left for the project developers.

Lastly, we wanted to address feedback around better supportability and error handling. The documentation has been written by engineers for engineers, and that can make it difficult for business leaders and executives to understand the value of a tool like Runway.

We have attempted to create high-level documentation and examples for the non-engineering audience in the hope that the spirit of Runway will be understood and more easily adopted by organizational leaders. Error handing and reporting has also been greatly improved by upgrading to Pydantic V2 to help improve root cause analysis and troubleshooting efforts. But there may still be more that can be done.

We look forward to hearing your feedback and welcome your contributions and support of Runway’s bright future! We also have a new Discord server located here. Check out the new home of Runway at https://github.com/rackspace/runway. While you’re there, spend some time familiarizing yourself with some other fun open-source projects as well.