How do users get new versions of Control Broker?

[dnaphas-vri]

After I deploy Control Broker in an account, I want to pull in changes from this repo that happened after I initially deployed.

I could pull in changes in Git, but I might have merge conflicts, since the policies for my account live in https://github.com/VerticalRelevance/control-broker/tree/main/supplementary_files/pac_frameworks/ in my repo. And I might have other downstream changes that conflict with upstream, especially since upstream might change the directory structure.

The README says Please note that this software is meant as a starting point and is therefore not production-ready, but this is also a versioned product, and practically speaking I want new features and bug fixes from upstream.

We could deploy Control Broker as a PYPI package and/or to CDK Construct Hub. That would make updates easier, but we would need to rethink how you supply the construct or package with the policies you want to enforce.

[dnaphas-vri]

If the stacks in the stacks directory were switched over to TypeScript, we could use the NPM registry and Construct Hub, though we would also have to conform to other Construct Hub requirements pertaining to things like file structure.

I think this is worth doing. I think we would have a better chance of seeing Control Broker adopted if we use the CDK ecosystem's tools for code reuse.

We wouldn't have to rewrite the Lambda Function code. Python code could still import and use Control Broker, since Construct Hub constructs are available across languages thanks to JSII.

[eppeters]

From the Contributing page on the Construct Hub site, there are some APN specific benefits to doing this beyond compatibility with other languages:

AWS Partner Network (APN) badge. If you’re an AWS partner and you are publishing a library for your offering, please reach out to us and we will be happy to add a badge to your libraries with your company’s name.

The search page allows searching by Publisher, which appears to be available for APN partners:

One less related but potentially helpful thing we could do here is architect this repo to generate Control Broker in both Terraform and Cloudformation, since we have customers who want Terraform, and it would be good to start from a known implementation.

[dnaphas-vri]

We're going to port Control Broker's CDK resources from Python to TypeScript, and publish Control Broker to NPM and the CDK Construct Hub, as part of this.

[eppeters]

Creating branch https://github.com/VerticalRelevance/control-broker/tree/construct-hub to track this work.