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The AWS UI heralds a more general move towards open source and away from Windows.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the first release of what they are calling AWS UI, what they call a first step in creating a new open source design system.

Industry observers have noted that AWS has recently seemed to encouraged its customers to move away from the Microsoft .NET and Windows, and toward the open-source “Linux ecosystem”. This release seems to confirm that trend.

Relying on JavaScript and React components

For the UI, AWS seems to be relying on JavaScript/TypeScript and React for its cross-platform user interface components. This allows them to benefit by being able to share libraries between web and desktop. React is a popular JavaScript framework originally developed by Facebook.

The project release declares:

“AWS UI is a collection of React components that help create intuitive, responsive, and accessible user experiences for web applications. It is developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This work is available under the terms of the Apache 2.0 open source license.”

“This package provides AWS UI React components, AWS confirms. The company also informs that customers can use these components “in conjunction with” @awsui/collection-hooks, @awsui/design-tokens, @awsui/global-styles, and @awsui/test-utils-core.

“This release allows Amazon teams to release open source products that have a dependency on the AWS UI components. It is just the first step in a larger process of creating a new open source design system.”

The UI’s source code is not yet available

Although Amazon released the AWS UI project under the Apache 2.0 open-source licence, the source code is not yet on GitHub or other such locations. Rather, the code is only available as NPM packages.

Amazon has not yet released or open sourced the AWS UI’s source code. “For now the best way to obtain the list of available components and parameters for the components is to look into the package within node_modules,” they explain.

Despite the lack of documentation, however, there is no need to fear. “If you need additional help with AWS UI please file an issue” AWS assures us, “we will be happy to provide the help you need.”