We've appreciated all the great feedback on Canvas Data 2 since we released it in March. Today we are going to share some updates on planned features as well as guidance related to timelines and migration.

The day is fast approaching when customers can opt in to Canvas Data 2.  It’s been a major development effort and finally, the big day is the 18th of March. YEEEY. 🥳 Read on to learn more about this exciting news and what it means for your institution.

We are very excited to share that Canvas Data 2 has evolved from infancy into adolescence. We started last year in June with inputs and feedback from 13 Alpha customers from two regions and have grown to over 100 Beta customers around the world. The maturity will continue to accelerate as Canvas Data 2 is made publicly available in March. At full maturity, Canvas Data 2 will evolve to become a modern data access platform that will provide developers with efficient and flexible access to data from various Instructure products in bulk with high fidelity and low latency. 

It is time to share progress on the Canvas Data 2 product development.

First, a big THANK YOU to all who have completed the CD2 survey. I was really excited to see how this number has been growing day by day, a number that shows a great interest in what we are building. The amount of responses will guide us in the product decisions to ensure Canvas Data 2 meets your needs. We are also using the results to validate some of our assumptions and anticipate future improvement needs.

As promised, in this blog post I will share some further news on our progress with Canvas Data 2. In my previous post I mentioned why we needed to re-architecture our data pipeline and what things we are working on. This time, I would like to give you insights into the progress with the product, an overview of the features, what will and what will not be part of the initial release, and a high-level overview of the timeline. In the end of the blog post, I would like to ask you to please fill in a survey because we want to learn your needs to make CD2 not just a better version of CD1 but an amazing user experience that surpasses your expectations.

Let’s just start in medias res because I am pretty sure that most of you are curious about not just the state of the Canvas Data 2 but also about what comes next (and why it didn’t come yet).

The questions I expect you might be wondering about are: 

• What are the next steps after we started the early access and the actual state?
• When will we make it available for more customers and what features will it include initially?
• When are we planning to deprecate CD1?

When I think about education and what it means to me, one word irrevocably comes to my mind which is “Ikigai”—the Japanese word referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose. Let's talk about Ikigal in your world and mine.