Operate OpenStack? Take the Survey. Here’s why it matters

OpenStack is big. It’s one of the three most active open source projects in history. It is running on more than 10 million cores in production. Hundreds of users around the world count on it for mission-critical workloads. And, there’s an upstream developer community that’s eager for feedback from users so they can set priorities on how to improve the software.

Seven years ago, the OpenStack Foundation launched the OpenStack User Survey to address this need. Since then, it’s allowed the community to gain valuable insight into use cases and the global scale of implementation, then use that feedback to address feature requests and user requirements.

What is the OpenStack User Survey?

The User Survey is one of the best ways that the community can learn from OpenStack operators how to better understand what operators need to support their use cases. The results tell us more about:

user organizations, including what industries and geographies are running OpenStack in production,
key motivators for selecting OpenStack and opinions on what works best and what could benefit from improvement in both the software and the community, and
specific deployment information including size, OpenStack version, workloads, and vendor plugins and products being used.

Each deployment is logged separately in the survey, and this information is only presented in aggregate—no deployment information is shared that includes an organization name unless participants provide explicit permission.

Who should take the User Survey?

Every organization that operates an OpenStack deployment should complete a survey. There only needs to be one survey completed for each deployment, so we recommend coordinating with your team to prevent duplicate submissions.

Please complete as much information as you can. You are also able to save the survey and return later if you do not have all of the information at one time.

Why is taking the User Survey important?

Direct feedback from the individuals and organizations operating OpenStack helps the upstream development community know what features to prioritize and which bugs to fix first, among other important learnings on how the software is being used. Each of the official project teams has the opportunity to add a question to the survey as well as review anonymized data and trends to further influence their roadmaps.

If you are operating OpenStack and you have feedback you would like implemented, the User Survey is one of your opportunities.

The 2020 OpenStack User Survey is currently open and will close on Friday, August 21.

Tags: cloud, OpenStack

Author
Recent Posts

Allison Price

Director of Marketing & Community at Open Infrastructure Foundation

Allison manages Marketing Content initiatives including case study development, advertising campaigns, the Superuser online publication and OpenStack User Survey. Her past roles have specialized in social strategy and execution for both B2B and B2C global companies in the technology and consumer industries. In her spare time, she enjoys finding new hiking trails and sharing her love with Celine Dion with anyone and everyone who will listen.