# Opscode Chef survey results

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/opscode-chef-survey-results/1833>\
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)\
**Created:** [May 16, 2011, 7:31pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/opscode-chef-survey-results/1833 "2011-05-16T19:31:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Bryan\_McLellan1](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/bryan_mclellan1/32/426_2.png) [@Bryan\_McLellan1](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Bryan_McLellan1)\
**Post date:** [May 16, 2011, 7:31pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/opscode-chef-survey-results/1833/1 "2011-05-16T19:31:32Z")

</div>

A week ago we put out a survey asking some questions to help drive the  
work Opscode does stewarding Chef releases. We’d like to share some of  
the results with everyone in the community.

The survey was initially released to twitter and the mailing list,  
pulling in 59 and 55 responses before I closed them this morning. Upon  
request, I provided another link to IRC which pulled in 4 responses  
for a total of 108 responses. Unfortunately, Survey Monkey only gives  
you access to the first 100 responses. I’ve talked to our marketing  
folks about sharing a tool with them in the future. We tried to target  
this survey to current Chef users and it was intentionally more  
grassroots than a survey that marketing put out a couple weeks ago. I  
believe they offered free t-shirts whereas we only offered our undying  
love and goodwill. I’ve seen the results of the survey that marketing  
did, but I’m not at liberty to speak directly to its results. I will  
say that people clearly love Chef, or maybe they just love t-shirts.  
Some of the results are interesting, but they’re mostly target market  
type questions and not directly relevant to the open source projects.

We did well targeting the community, with over half of the responders  
running their own Chef server. We were psyched to see that while 65%  
of you were using the 0.9 release, 60% were also using 0.10. This  
probably indicates that most people are trying 0.10 but haven’t  
upgraded all of their nodes yet.

- How do you currently install Chef?  
69.0% Rubygems  
16.0% Debian packages  
8.0% Redhat packages  
7.0% Other (Ports, from source, etc)

This wasn’t particularly surprising as we’ve always focused on  
Rubygems being our primary release mechanism and treated Debian  
packaging as a release format for those who couldn’t live without  
traditional packaging. We’ve been shepherding some community work on  
Redhat packages lately, and are considering committing to something  
official.

- What role or job description most closely matches what you do?  
32% Devops  
(other answers omitted)

This question was also in the marketing survey, in which 40% chose  
Devops. I included this question to see the difference in responses  
between the community and those who answered the other survey. Surely  
there was crossover, and this provided some indication of that. This  
is interesting as some believe that devops is strictly a cultural  
change where development and operations work more closely together,  
whereas others believe it represents a new job title for someone who  
does both. As a sysadmin, I’ve always been a  
sec/dev/sys/net/hvac/ops/janitor, so I enjoy being a fly on the wall  
amidst these debates.

- What is the primary operating system or distribution in your environment?  
54.2% Ubuntu   
17.7% CentOS   
12.5% Debian   
7.3% Redhat   
3.1% FreeBSD   
2.1% Other   
1.0% Fedora   
1.0% SuSE   
1.0% Windows   
0.0% Gentoo

As expected, this somewhat mirrors what Chef currently supports. There  
are a few differences between Ubuntu + Debian, as well as CentOS +  
Fedora + Redhat, that Chef providers, Ohai plugins and Cookbooks have  
to take into account, so we’re gauging where we should be spending  
time testing across these platforms. It is interesting to ask  
ourselves to what degree low numbers are due to a cultural difference  
between the users of that operating system or distribution and the way  
that Chef works, or because we haven’t provided enough support to  
encourage those users to join our community yet.

- How important is it to you that Chef can manage these operating systems?

Debian 20.2% (17) 8.3% (7) 23.8% (20) 14.3% (12) 33.3% (28)  
Ubuntu 6.8% (6) 2.3% (2) 11.4% (10) 10.2% (9) 69.3% (61)  
Redhat 28.2% (24) 14.1% (12) 20.0% (17) 12.9% (11) 24.7% (21)  
Fedora 45.0% (36) 17.5% (14) 21.3% (17) 10.0% (8) 6.3% (5)  
CentOS 19.8% (17) 11.6% (10) 18.6% (16) 12.8% (11) 37.2% (32)  
SuSE 72.2% (57) 16.5% (13) 5.1% (4) 2.5% (2) 3.8% (3)   
Gentoo 71.3% (57) 17.5% (14) 5.0% (4) 2.5% (2) 3.8% (3)   
FreeBSD 59.3% (48) 17.3% (14) 11.1% (9) 3.7% (3) 8.6% (7)   
Windows 54.7% (47) 20.9% (18) 7.0% (6) 9.3% (8) 8.1% (7)   
Other 65.7% (46) 17.1% (12) 10.0% (7) 4.3% (3) 2.9% (2)

```
    | Not important | Fairly important | Important | Very

```

important | Essential  
Debian | 20.2% (17) | 8.3% (7) | 23.8% (20) | 14.3% (12)  
| 33.3% (28)  
Ubuntu | 6.8% (6) | 2.3% (2) | 11.4% (10) | 10.2% (9)  
| 69.3% (61)  
Redhat | 28.2% (24) | 14.1% (12) | 20.0% (17) | 12.9% (11)  
| 24.7% (21)  
Fedora | 45.0% (36) | 17.5% (14) | 21.3% (17) | 10.0% (8)  
| 6.3% (5)  
CentOS | 19.8% (17) | 11.6% (10) | 18.6% (16) | 12.8% (11)  
| 37.2% (32)  
SuSE | 72.2% (57) | 16.5% (13) | 5.1% (4) | 2.5% (2)  
| 3.8% (3)  
Gentoo | 71.3% (57) | 17.5% (14) | 5.0% (4) | 2.5% (2)  
| 3.8% (3)  
FreeBSD | 59.3% (48) | 17.3% (14) | 11.1% (9) | 3.7% (3)  
| 8.6% (7)  
Windows | 54.7% (47) | 20.9% (18) | 7.0% (6) | 9.3% (8)  
| 8.1% (7)  
Other | 65.7% (46) | 17.1% (12) | 10.0% (7) | 4.3% (3)  
| 2.9% (2)

I’m including this table twice, once with spaces and once with tabs.  
Text based tables are hard. Hopefully one will look okay for you.

The responder could vote once for each operating system /  
distribution, or choose not to at all. What’s important from this data  
to point out is that Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian, in that order, were  
all considered essential by the majority who voted for those lines.  
The remainder got a majority vote of “not important.” I suspect we’re  
not seeing a lot of heterogeneous shops out there in our community.

I know the Opscode services team has been working toward adding and  
verifying CentOS support in more cookbooks and we’ve been discussing  
how we’re going to ramp up our CentOS support in core Chef and in the  
packaging. You can expect to see progress in these areas in the near  
future.

- Which packaging task would be most meaningful to you?

18.7% “Fat” binary installer that includes Ruby + all deps   
53.8% Releasing Debian packages simultaneously with Gem releases   
27.5% An official Opscode RPM repository

This is kind of a trick question, because we’ve been talking about or  
actually working on all of these. Generally, there are reasons for  
doing so to increase the community, but it is very interesting to see  
what current users want.

- Is there anything else that we can do for you?

This was an open format question. I’ve read all the responses and  
appreciate them. Unfortunately the survey as anonymous so I can’t help  
out the person who wanted us to give them "one million dollarzzz :)"  
but I’ll work on more “Chocolate chip cookies.” =D

The serious answers were pretty much along the lines of what I’ve  
heard and thus expect. We’re working every day on tasks like improving  
documentation and making Opscode + Chef easier. I’m sure those of you  
who have been around for a year or two have noticed the changes.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to respond.

–  
Bryan McLellan | opscode | senior systems administrator  
© 206.607.7108 | (t) @btmspox | (b) [http://blog.loftninjas.org](http://blog.loftninjas.org)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sergio\_Rubio](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/sergio_rubio/32/754_2.png) [@Sergio\_Rubio](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Sergio_Rubio)\
**Post date:** [May 17, 2011, 9:20am UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/opscode-chef-survey-results/1833/2 "2011-05-17T09:20:39Z")

</div>

Thanks for sharing!

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 9:31 PM, Bryan McLellan [btm@opscode.com](mailto:btm@opscode.com) wrote:

> A week ago we put out a survey asking some questions to help drive the  
> work Opscode does stewarding Chef releases. We'd like to share some of  
> the results with everyone in the community.
> 
> The survey was initially released to twitter and the mailing list,  
> pulling in 59 and 55 responses before I closed them this morning. Upon  
> request, I provided another link to IRC which pulled in 4 responses  
> for a total of 108 responses. Unfortunately, Survey Monkey only gives  
> you access to the first 100 responses. I've talked to our marketing  
> folks about sharing a tool with them in the future. We tried to target  
> this survey to current Chef users and it was intentionally more  
> grassroots than a survey that marketing put out a couple weeks ago. I  
> believe they offered free t-shirts whereas we only offered our undying  
> love and goodwill. I've seen the results of the survey that marketing  
> did, but I'm not at liberty to speak directly to its results. I will  
> say that people clearly love Chef, or maybe they just love t-shirts.  
> Some of the results are interesting, but they're mostly target market  
> type questions and not directly relevant to the open source projects.
> 
> We did well targeting the community, with over half of the responders  
> running their own Chef server. We were psyched to see that while 65%  
> of you were using the 0.9 release, 60% were also using 0.10. This  
> probably indicates that most people are trying 0.10 but haven't  
> upgraded all of their nodes yet.
> 
> - How do you currently install Chef?  
> 69.0% Rubygems  
> 16.0% Debian packages  
> 8.0% Redhat packages  
> 7.0% Other (Ports, from source, etc)
> 
> This wasn't particularly surprising as we've always focused on  
> Rubygems being our primary release mechanism and treated Debian  
> packaging as a release format for those who couldn't live without  
> traditional packaging. We've been shepherding some community work on  
> Redhat packages lately, and are considering committing to something  
> official.
> 
> - What role or job description most closely matches what you do?  
> 32% Devops  
> (other answers omitted)
> 
> This question was also in the marketing survey, in which 40% chose  
> Devops. I included this question to see the difference in responses  
> between the community and those who answered the other survey. Surely  
> there was crossover, and this provided some indication of that. This  
> is interesting as some believe that devops is strictly a cultural  
> change where development and operations work more closely together,  
> whereas others believe it represents a new job title for someone who  
> does both. As a sysadmin, I've always been a  
> sec/dev/sys/net/hvac/ops/janitor, so I enjoy being a fly on the wall  
> amidst these debates.
> 
> - What is the primary operating system or distribution in your environment?  
> 54.2% Ubuntu  
> 17.7% CentOS  
> 12.5% Debian  
> 7.3% Redhat  
> 3.1% FreeBSD  
> 2.1% Other  
> 1.0% Fedora  
> 1.0% SuSE  
> 1.0% Windows  
> 0.0% Gentoo
> 
> As expected, this somewhat mirrors what Chef currently supports. There  
> are a few differences between Ubuntu + Debian, as well as CentOS +  
> Fedora + Redhat, that Chef providers, Ohai plugins and Cookbooks have  
> to take into account, so we're gauging where we should be spending  
> time testing across these platforms. It is interesting to ask  
> ourselves to what degree low numbers are due to a cultural difference  
> between the users of that operating system or distribution and the way  
> that Chef works, or because we haven't provided enough support to  
> encourage those users to join our community yet.
> 
> - How important is it to you that Chef can manage these operating systems?
> 
> important | Essential  
> Debian | 20.2% (17) | 8.3% (7) | 23.8% (20) | 14.3% (12)  
> | 33.3% (28)  
> Ubuntu | 6.8% (6) | 2.3% (2) | 11.4% (10) | 10.2% (9)  
> | 69.3% (61)  
> Redhat | 28.2% (24) | 14.1% (12) | 20.0% (17) | 12.9% (11)  
> | 24.7% (21)  
> Fedora | 45.0% (36) | 17.5% (14) | 21.3% (17) | 10.0% (8)  
> | 6.3% (5)  
> CentOS | 19.8% (17) | 11.6% (10) | 18.6% (16) | 12.8% (11)  
> | 37.2% (32)  
> SuSE | 72.2% (57) | 16.5% (13) | 5.1% (4) | 2.5% (2)  
> | 3.8% (3)  
> Gentoo | 71.3% (57) | 17.5% (14) | 5.0% (4) | 2.5% (2)  
> | 3.8% (3)  
> FreeBSD | 59.3% (48) | 17.3% (14) | 11.1% (9) | 3.7% (3)  
> | 8.6% (7)  
> Windows | 54.7% (47) | 20.9% (18) | 7.0% (6) | 9.3% (8)  
> | 8.1% (7)  
> Other | 65.7% (46) | 17.1% (12) | 10.0% (7) | 4.3% (3)  
> | 2.9% (2)
> 
> I'm including this table twice, once with spaces and once with tabs.  
> Text based tables are hard. Hopefully one will look okay for you.
> 
> The responder could vote once for each operating system /  
> distribution, or choose not to at all. What's important from this data  
> to point out is that Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian, in that order, were  
> all considered essential by the majority who voted for those lines.  
> The remainder got a majority vote of "not important." I suspect we're  
> not seeing a lot of heterogeneous shops out there in our community.
> 
> I know the Opscode services team has been working toward adding and  
> verifying CentOS support in more cookbooks and we've been discussing  
> how we're going to ramp up our CentOS support in core Chef and in the  
> packaging. You can expect to see progress in these areas in the near  
> future.
> 
> - Which packaging task would be most meaningful to you?
> 
> 18.7% "Fat" binary installer that includes Ruby + all deps  
> 53.8% Releasing Debian packages simultaneously with Gem releases  
> 27.5% An official Opscode RPM repository
> 
> This is kind of a trick question, because we've been talking about or  
> actually working on all of these. Generally, there are reasons for  
> doing so to increase the community, but it is very interesting to see  
> what current users want.
> 
> - Is there anything else that we can do for you?
> 
> This was an open format question. I've read all the responses and  
> appreciate them. Unfortunately the survey as anonymous so I can't help  
> out the person who wanted us to give them "one million dollarzzz :)"  
> but I'll work on more "Chocolate chip cookies." =D
> 
> The serious answers were pretty much along the lines of what I've  
> heard and thus expect. We're working every day on tasks like improving  
> documentation and making Opscode + Chef easier. I'm sure those of you  
> who have been around for a year or two have noticed the changes.
> 
> Thanks to everyone for taking the time to respond.
> 
> --  
> Bryan McLellan | opscode | senior systems administrator  
> (c) 206.607.7108 | (t) @btmspox | (b) [http://blog.loftninjas.org](http://blog.loftninjas.org)

--  
Sergio Rubio

FrameOS Linux  
[http://www.frameos.org](http://www.frameos.org)  
twitter: @rubiojr  
blog: [http://blog.frameos.org](http://blog.frameos.org)