Ansible Ecosystem Survey 2024 - now live!

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Hello Ansible!

The Ansible Project Survey is now live, and you can fill it out here! :tada:

Can you believe we’ve never done a project-wide survey before? I couldn’t, and when I realised it, I knew (as a data person) I had to do something about it. We’ve done smaller, targeted things, but the last decent-size survey was specifically about docs (and that was in 2020 :astonished:).

So, with great pleasure (and a decent about of anxiety :stuck_out_tongue:) I’m glad to present the 2024 Ansible survey. I’ve spent the last few months figuring out what I want to know (as a community data person) but also talking to our various project leads, our Steering Committee, our developers, etc, to find out what they want to know too. The result is a fairly long survey (it’ll take you about 20 mins, on average), but again we’ve never done this before so there’s a lot of ground to cover.

A good survey is about more than just making nice bar charts (although I’ve been doing that for a pretty long time, 2016 was my first and 2018 was the first done “properly”) - it’s about being able to make models of interactions between questions to draw some better conclusions. The raw distributions are useful, yes (such as the versions of Ansible in use, the roles & industries, etc), but I’m also interested in your journeys - e.g. how experience with Ansible maps to roles & ages, how your satisfaction changes with use of more complex features & tools, or what impacts contribution. Being able to model such things; to account for different factors like industry or age, and then look more deeply at what variation remains is highly useful. I’m not alone - take a look at some of the models in the State of DevOps Report 2023 for inspiration.

The survey will run for about a month, so you have time to think - but please do fill it in. I want the best quality dataset I can get, so we have a clear lens to look at the ecosystem through.

Thanks for your time and feedback!

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Hi @gwmngilfen,

Very nice and comprehensive. Took some time to think about the answers and fill them in but it was a pleasure :grinning:.

I have a few remarks regarding some questions, though:

    1. What version of Ansible do you use? - Some people use multiple versions. EEs are all about that, especially in cases when you are in a middle of some transition to newer version of Ansible or collections… or AAP.
    1. Do you publish any of your Ansible content publicly? - There is no answer for some of us that maintain a part of some publicly available collection like community.general or even contribute to multiple community collections.
    1. How would you rate the ease of writing an Ansible playbook, on a scale of 1-10? - Ooohhh boy. This is a rather contextual question. The answer pretty much depend on the type and complexity of automation problems you are trying to solve. For simple tasks, it can be a breeze because you can find a lot of documentation materials online, a lot of examples, community is helpful, hack even ChatGPT can write whole playbooks for you etc. I tend to delve into very very complex problems and I find it very hard to do some stuff using Ansible. There were numerous road blocks I encountered with Ansible where I doubted Ansible was a proper choice for the automation tool. Thus, I rated this question pretty low :smile:.
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Thanks for the feedback @bvitnik! Glad you enjoyed the experience, that’s a great thing to hear as surveys often aren’t that fun :slight_smile:

Your feedback is all on point, I can’t disagree - all I can say is that no survey is perfect for everyone unless it’s so generic as to be almost useless. The world is a messy place! My advice would be to pick the “biggest” or perhaps the “most important” environment in such situations.

On contribution, we do ask about that later, maybe I should make that apparent in the text (I can’t change the options now the survey is in progress). I will consider it - but even changing the text is risky in statistical terms, as it means people were give two different instructions. And I fully support you going for worst-case with the playbook question :rofl:

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I said it really depends if there is already a community collection. For example Hyper-V has 0 support.
Very difficult are custom API (ParkMyCloud for example), where ansible itself just calls URLs and sends or receives json data. The collection itself is great with header definition etc. I am not sure how this can be made easier.

p.s. will the results be published?

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I definitely plan to publish all the interesting things I find in the data, yes! I might not publish everything because 60+ bar graphs isn’t very readable, but the good stuff is worth sharing with everyone.

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I note there is no mechanism to say ‘if you need more information reach out to me here’. Not sure if deliberate or not, just thought I’d drop a comment so others were aware.

In my case i put a link to my forum profile in an answer where it seemed relevant in case my bullet points weren’t clear enough.

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Thanks @goetzk, that’s appreciated. I’m aware that privacy is a big concern for a lot of people, so I was wary of asking such things, but for those that are willing it’s lovely to have that option :heart:

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Thanks for organising the survey, I am looking forward to the results :grin:

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Help needed: Just 2 minutes of your time

We are doing the first big Ansible Survey this year. For this to be successful we need a a wide ranging and diverse set of responses, we’d really appreciate if you can share these social links to your own networks.

For more context, see the Forum Post