(GeekWire Photo / Tom Krazit)

In what it is calling an experiment, Amazon Web Services shared its near-term road map for features and services built around containers Tuesday, a surprising move from a company that is notoriously tight-lipped about its future plans.

The road map came about because “we know that our customers are making decisions and plans based on what we are developing, and we want to provide our customers the insights they need to plan,” AWS said in a GitHub post explaining its move. At the moment it is just focused on container services like Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, AWS Fargate, and Amazon EKS, but it will also include “other AWS-sponsored OSS (open-source software) projects,” the cloud market share leader said.

There are three categories on the road map: “just shipped,” “coming soon (‘think a couple of months out, give or take,’ AWS said),” and “we’re working on it,” for longer-term items. AWS does not plan to include specific dates or deadlines for projects listed on the road map, and unfortunately it doesn’t sound like this will make CEO Andy Jassy’s marathon re:Invent keynotes any shorter: “there will be technologies we are very excited about that we are going to launch without notice to surprise and delight our customers,” AWS said.

Needless to say, it will be very interesting to see how often AWS updates this road map, and how much detail it will get into about upcoming features that it plans to launch. Customers will also be able to submit feedback on existing plans or suggest new ones.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.