We recently ran the 2016 version of our Ansible Community Survey. This is a survey of Ansible users and community members, regarding how they're using Ansible in their environments. We thought it would be useful to share some of the aggregate results. (As we did not ask for permission to distribute individual responses, we cannot make the raw data public.)
We had over 1,600 survey respondents, up from 1,300 when we last ran the survey in March of 2015.
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How long have you been using Ansible? |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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A month or less |
7.8% |
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1-2 months |
7.3% |
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2-6 months |
18.8% |
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6-12 months |
18.6% |
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over a year |
47.4% |
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number of respondents |
1,625 |
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Ansible continues to grow more veteran users - when surveyed in 2015, only 30% of respondents had used Ansible for more than a year.
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What version(s) of Ansible are you currently running? |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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pre-1.9.x |
5.0% |
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1.9.x |
27.8% |
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2.0.x |
41.6% |
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2.1.x |
51.4% |
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2.2/development |
6.7% |
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number of respondents |
1,623 |
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Note that respondents could pick multiple versions. All told, 80% of respondents have at least some usage of Ansible 2.0 or later.
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What operating system do you most frequently use as the Ansible control machine (the machine you run ansible-playbook from)? |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
12.5% |
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CentOS |
21.2% |
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Fedora |
4.8% |
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Ubuntu |
30.8% |
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Debian |
8.4% |
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Gentoo |
0.6% |
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Arch |
1.7% |
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OS X |
19.3% |
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FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD |
0.6% |
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Other (please specify) |
4.5% |
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number of respondents |
1,588 |
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Compared to past releases, we are seeing more RHEL and CentOS usage (up from 9% and 18%). Notable write-ins include Amazon Linux and the SuSE family of Linuxes, both with around 1%.
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What operating systems do you currently manage with Ansible? |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
33.1% |
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CentOS |
54.8% |
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Fedora |
6.2% |
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Ubuntu |
55.3% |
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Debian |
24.7% |
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Gentoo |
1.3% |
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Arch |
2.0% |
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OS X |
5.9% |
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FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD |
4.7% |
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Windows |
12.4% |
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Other (please specify) |
12.4% |
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number of respondents |
1,572 |
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Again, compared to 2015, we are seeing a slight uptick in RHEL and CentOS usage (which were at 25% and 48%, respectively). We also see dramatic increase in Windows usage, up over 5 points from 6.7%. Notable write-ins include Amazon Linux (ranking above a couple of our survey choices at 3%), the SuSE family of Linuxes, and a variety of networking devices.
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When you install or upgrade Ansible, you most frequently get it from: |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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pip |
36.6% |
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github |
12.2% |
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yum |
21.3% |
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apt |
19.8% |
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homebrew |
9.6% |
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macports |
0.4% |
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other (please specify) |
5.8% |
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number of respondents |
1,558 |
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78% of users are now pulling Ansible from their distribution package managers (yum/dnf, apt) or upstream package managers (pip), compared to 70% as of 2015.
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Which of the following Ansible features do you use? |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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Cloud deployment modules (ec2, rackspace, etc) |
43.7% |
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Windows support |
13.6% |
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Ansible Galaxy (I download roles) |
37.1% |
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Ansible Galaxy (I publish roles of my own for others to use) |
8.7% |
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Vault (encrypt data in Playbooks) |
44.3% |
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Accelerated mode (transport optimization) |
13.0% |
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SSH pipelining (transport optimization) |
39.4% |
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Jinja2 templates |
77.4% |
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Async actions |
20.6% |
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Database modules |
36.3% |
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Docker modules |
27.6% |
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Source control modules (checkout git/svn/hg for deployment, etc) |
52.5% |
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Unarchive module (deploy from a tarball) |
42.1% |
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Synchronize module (rsync wrapper) |
28.2% |
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number of respondents |
1,559 |
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What are some of the tools in your neighborhood? |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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Jenkins |
60.6% |
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Other CI System |
22.6% |
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Amazon AWS |
52.4% |
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Rackspace Cloud |
5.7% |
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Google Compute Engine |
7.4% |
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Microsoft Azure |
8.8% |
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VMware |
38.3% |
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OpenStack |
18.6% |
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Docker |
54.6% |
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Other Containers (LXC, Rocket,...) |
10.6% |
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Other Public Cloud |
7.2% |
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Other Private Cloud |
11.2% |
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Puppet |
18.4% |
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Chef |
10.3% |
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CFEngine |
2.4% |
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MCollective |
2.1% |
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Fabric |
7.6% |
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Capistrano |
6.8% |
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Vagrant |
54.9% |
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cowsay |
13.3% |
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Other (please specify) |
9.0% |
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number of respondents |
1,572 |
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As noted, this is an Ansible community survey, so we'll have Ansible-centric responders. On the cloud side, we see Azure up 3 percentage points from 2015. We see significant gains in Jenkins and other CI tools as people (up from 53% and 18%). Older deployment tools such as Fabric and Capistrano dropped, as both were at or above 11% in our 2015 survey.
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If you're using containers, how are you using them? |
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Answer Options |
Response Percent |
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Dev/Test |
89.8% |
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Production |
42.5% |
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With OpenShift |
4.1% |
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With Kubernetes |
11.0% |
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With Mesos |
5.6% |
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With Docker Swarm |
11.8% |
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Other (please specify) |
11.6% |
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number of respondents |
1,112 |
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This was a new question for our 2016 survey, and shows just how far containerization has come - over 2/3 of our respondents described how they were using containers. Amazon ECS was a write-in with 2.6% of respondents.
