Research:Cloud Services Annual Survey/2019
The 2019 survey collected feedback from Toolforge project members and Cloud VPS project administrators on how the services offered can be improved to help their development and maintenance needs.
Participants edit
The participants of the survey are the members of the Wikimedia Toolforge project and Cloud VPS project administrators. 1857 participants were contacted via email. The emails were harvested from the Cloud Services' LDAP system ("developer accounts") and the Wikitech database. The final list was created by finding the union of the members of the Toolforge project and all users with "administrator" rights on one or more Cloud VPS projects. Users who have opted-out of email contact by other users in their Wikitech preferences or the survey specific opt-out page were excluded. Specific opt-outs for the Annual Survey can be made by users at wikitech:Annual Toolforge Survey/Opt out.
108 email recipients participated in the survey which represents 6% of those who were contacted.
Dates edit
The 2019 survey was active between 2019-11-25 and 2019-12-13.
Questions and answers edit
Basic demographics edit
About how many years have you used Toolforge or Cloud VPS? edit
| Cohort | Percentage |
| 1 Year | 20.7% |
| 2-3 Years | 24.1% |
| 4-5 Years | 27.6% |
| 6+ Years | 27.6% |
How many tools have you developed on Toolforge or Cloud VPS? edit
| Cohort | Percentage |
| 0-1 Tools | 25.3% |
| 2 Tools | 27.6% |
| 3-6 Tools | 25.3% |
| 7+ Tools | 21.8% |
How many tools do you actively maintain in Toolforge or Cloud VPS? edit
| Cohort | Percentage |
| 0-1 Maintain | 31.4% |
| 2 Maintain | 29.1% |
| 3-5 Maintain | 23.3% |
| 6+ Maintain | 16.3% |
About how many hours per week do you spend developing or maintaining tools on Toolforge or Cloud VPS? edit
| Cohort | Percentage |
| 0 Hours | 22.1% |
| 1 Hour | 21.8% |
| 2-3 Hours | 12.6% |
| 4-8 Hours | 19.5% |
| 10+ Hours | 22.1% |
Which Cloud Services platforms do you use? edit
Derived from answers to the questions "Are you a member of the Toolforge project?" and "Are you an administrator of one of more Cloud VPS projects?"
| Cohort | Percentage |
| Toolforge | 61.1% |
| Cloud VPS | 5.6% |
| Both | 24.1% |
Do you use Toolforge or Cloud VPS to run or develop tools? edit
| Cohort | Percentage |
| No | 13.9% |
| Yes | 86.1% |
Additional demographics edit
What kinds of tools do you work on? edit
| Tool kind | Percentage |
| Bots | 75.0% |
| Webapps | 72.8% |
| Apis | 30.4% |
| Gadgets | 25.0% |
| Dataviz | 22.8% |
| Microsites | 17.4% |
| Abuse Ai | 1.1% |
| Ai Systems Deployment | 1.1% |
| Analytics | 1.1% |
| Irc Bot | 1.1% |
| Reports | 1.1% |
| Wikidata Import Scripts | 1.1% |
Which Wikimedia projects are your tools built to work with? edit
| Project | Percentage |
| Wikipedia | 76.1% |
| Wikidata | 35.9% |
| Wikimedia Commons | 33.7% |
| All Wikimedia projects | 26.1% |
| Wikisource | 9.8% |
| Wiktionary | 8.7% |
| Wikibooks | 7.6% |
| Wikiquote | 6.5% |
| Wikinews | 5.4% |
| Wikivoyage | 5.4% |
| Wikiversity | 4.4% |
| MediaWiki | 2.2% |
| Wikispecies | 2.2% |
| IRC | 1.1% |
| Wikitech | 1.1% |
What storage/caching services do you use when running your tools? edit
| Yes/No | Percentage |
| MySQL/MariaDB | 73.8% |
| Redis | 26.2% |
| SQLite | 16.4% |
| MongoDB | 4.9% |
| PostgreSQL | 3.3% |
| Static files | 3.3% |
| ToolsDB | 3.3% |
| Custom | 1.6% |
| ElasticSearch | 1.6% |
| Filesystem | 1.6% |
| Memcached | 1.6% |
| Wiki Replicas | 1.6% |
Are you a member of the Toolforge project? edit
| Yes/No | Percentage |
| Yes | 85.2% |
| No | 14.8% |
Which programming languages do you use on Toolforge? edit
| Project | Percentage |
| Python 3 | 68.1% |
| PHP | 37.4% |
| Python 2 | 26.4% |
| NodeJS | 15.4% |
| Other | 13.2% |
| Perl | 11.0% |
| Javascript | 5.5% |
| Java | 4.4% |
| Mono/.NET/C# | 4.4% |
When you develop a tool, how much of your work developing code to run on Toolforge is done locally on your machine (as opposed to remotely on Toolforge)? edit
| Answer | Percentage |
| Almost all of the work | 54.4% |
| Less than half of the work | 16.3% |
| More than half of the work | 14.1% |
| About half of the work | 8.7% |
| I don't know | 6.5% |
Which source control mechanism do you use to manage your tool's source code? edit
| Answer | Percentage |
| Git | 84.8% |
| I do not use source control | 15.2% |
If we could improve one thing in Toolforge in the next year, what should that be? edit
This a curated summary of the different topics mentioned in the comments. Further commentary in the last section about Freeform comments.
| Topic | Mentions in answers |
| Documentation | 13 |
| Support | 10 |
| Languages and libraries | 8 |
| Performance | 8 |
| Storage | 7 |
| Deployment | 4 |
| Network | 4 |
| Docker | 3 |
| Kubernetes | 3 |
| Logs | 3 |
| Monitoring | 3 |
| Getting started | 2 |
| Local development with Toolforge resources / data | 2 |
| Security (subdomains) | 2 |
| SSH | 2 |
| Other | 11 |
Are you an administrator of one of more Cloud VPS projects? edit
| Answer | Percentage |
| Yes | 29.6% |
| No | 70.4% |
About how many years have you used Cloud VPS? edit
| Cohort | Percentage |
| 1 Year | 7.7% |
| 2-3 Years | 38.5% |
| 4-5 Years | 26.9% |
| 6+ Years | 26.9% |
What do you use Cloud VPS for? edit
| Answer | Percentage |
| Hosting one or more tools or other public services such as a web app; bot; dashboard; API; etc. | 75.0% |
| Testing and experimenting with software | 50.0% |
| Running one or more MediaWiki instances | 37.5% |
| Running a backing service (database; cache; etc.) for a tool or other public service | 34.4% |
| Conducting data analysis or other large computational tasks | 15.6% |
Do you rely on NFS for accessing the same files across different servers? edit
| Answer | Percentage |
| No | 61.3% |
| Yes | 38.7% |
If we could improve one thing in Cloud VPS in the next year, what should that be? edit
This a curated summary of the different topics mentioned in the comments. Further commentary in the last section about Freeform comments.
| Topic | Mentions in answers |
| Configuration Management | 4 |
| Storage | 3 |
| Maintenance | 2 |
| Quotas | 2 |
| Deployment | 1 |
| Documentation | 1 |
| Monitoring | 1 |
| Network | 1 |
| Other | 2 |
Wikimedia Cloud Services is one of many providers of cloud computing resources. What made you decide to choose Wikimedia Cloud Services as opposed to other options? edit
| Answer | Percentage |
| Access to Wikimedia-specific resources | 81.2% |
| Cost | 60.4% |
| Ease of collaborating with other Wikimedians | 56.4% |
| Ease of use | 36.6% |
| Philosophical or ideological reasons | 32.7% |
| Privacy and security considerations | 24.8% |
Are you currently employed by the Wikimedia Foundation as an employee, contractor, vendor, or intern? edit
| Answer | Percentage |
| No | 86.8% |
| Yes | 13.2% |
Qualitative questions edit
A series of qualitative questions were asked in order to gauge general satisfaction with Toolforge and Cloud VPS.
When I look for documentation on Wikitech about Toolforge or Cloud VPS I usually find what I was looking for. edit
The documentation I find on Wikitech about Toolforge or Cloud VPS usually answers my question. edit
The documentation I find on Wikitech about Toolforge or Cloud VPS is easy to read and understand. edit
edit
This a curated summary of the different topics mentioned in the comments. Further commentary in the last section about Freeform comments.
| Topic | Mentioned in comments |
| Out of date | 6 |
| Getting started | 3 |
| Hard to find | 3 |
| Praise | 3 |
| Lacking (DB Schemas) | 2 |
| Scattered | 2 |
| Support | 2 |
| Unclear organization | 2 |
Services provided by Wikimedia Cloud Services, including Toolforge and Cloud VPS, have high uptime edit
It is easy to have code run on Toolforge or Cloud VPS edit
I feel that I am supported by the Cloud Services team when I contact them via cloud@lists.wikimedia.org, the #wikimedia-cloud IRC channel, or Phabricator. edit
I receive useful information via the “cloud-announce” and/or “cloud” mailing lists. edit
Free form responses edit
The survey included several free form response sections. Survey participants were told that we would only publicly share their responses or survey results in aggregate or anonymized form.
If we could improve one thing in Toolforge in the next year, what should that be? edit
Responses fell mainly under 5 main categories:
Documentation (14 comments) edit
The most mentioned topic was having more and better docs for getting started and introductory materials. Closely following and related was having more documentation about how to use a bigger variety of languages and libraries. And finally, some comments about having more video material (tutorials, talks and presentations).
Support & Community (12 comments) edit
These comments mentioned more support for beginners via documentation and tutorials, having places for discussion, resolving problems and knowledge sharing, better direct support from the team.
Platform (40 comments) edit
Within this theme, there is a wide variety in the comments.
Top mentions are better support for more languages, software and libraries, both having the latest versions and the ability to use other languages and libraries (and having more varied documentation with this regard). And also multiple mentions of improving performance of SSH sessions, file system and WikiReplicas.
Related but separately, there were multiple comments mentioning improving storage, both capacity and performance, of various DBs and the file systems (NFS).
There were also some comments related to workflows, that will be summarized in the next section, related to platform wanting to have other deployment mechanisms related to Docker images and Kubernetes.
Other comments not included in previous mentions talked about improving security, particularly around sharing subdomain.
The rest of the comments cannot be anonymously summarized because of their small numbers.
Workflow (13 comments) edit
In the workflow category, the most mentioned topic was deployment, having easier and more flexible options for deployment (git or docker based for example).
Following is observability, people mention both logs and monitoring, easier access and setup of logs and error reporting, and ways to monitor their projects.
Lastly it was mentioned wanting to have a way to develop software locally having access to Toolforge's data.
If we could improve one thing in Cloud VPS in the next year, what should that be? edit
We have less responses here so the summary will be a bit broad.
There is one clear ask mentioned in many comments, on the improving the configuration management side (better puppet support, more flexibility, more options).
Another topic mentioned multiple times as well is improving storage (faster, more space, easier maintenance when full).
The rest of the responses fell on a variety of topics: easier maintenance, quota related, deployment, documentation, monitoring, network, etc.
edit
The main complaint was about documentation being out of date, followed by being hard to find, and related, having a hard time getting started.
There were also comments praising the quality of the documentation (even if old and hard to find), which are greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Other topics mentioned including having better documentation for the DB schemas, the docs being too scattered or having unclear organization.
edit
Here there was a bunch of praise for the improvements and the services provided, which is greatly appreciated. We want to continue improving and doing a better job where we can. Thank you!
There were also some comments related to confusion with some of the questions, and some other comments that can't be shared anonymized.
Thanks to everyone that took the time and participated in the 2019 survey. See you soon in the 2020 one!