Rudder users and uses: Tales from a survey

🎥 Coming soon
🧑 Nicolas Charles
📅 Configuration Management Camp 2023

A quick overview of the Rudder users: their IT size, number and type of people working on configuration management, metrics about their uses and most common use cases.
To have the most extensive infos we sent a survey to our Rudder users to gather this data and we'll present here the results and insights from this survey.

Transcript

1. Rudder users and uses
   Tales from a survey
   1
   

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2. All rights reserved
   Survey - how and goal
   We’ve created an online survey to understand more about our users:
   ● Who they are,
   ● What they like and don’t like about Rudder,
   ● Their usages.
   Survey started on the 29/12, link sent:
   ● By mail
   ● On social networks
   2 / 20
   

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3. All rights reserved
   Survey - poor statistics
   The mail with the link to the survey was opened by 200 persons
   431 impressions on Twitter for the first message on 30/12/2022, 332 impressions for
   the second on 12/01/2023
   50 persons started to fill the survey.
   Only 15 answers: 11 full, 4 partials
   3 / 20
   

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   Survey - review the result
   Demographics
   Statistics
   Usages
   What we learnt
   4 / 20
   

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   Survey - results - demographics
   5 / 20
   Mostly long term users of Rudder
   

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   Survey - results - demographics
   These stats don’t match what we typically know of our users
   6 / 20
   

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   Survey - results - demographics
   Rudder is mainly an Operation tool
   Starts to by used by Security
   Note: Most people identified with
   several roles
   7 / 20
   

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   Survey - results - statistics
   Installations are mostly compliant
   One has average compliance due to
   disconnected systems
   8 / 20
   

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   Survey - results - statistics
   Infrastructure complexity
   Between 15 and 1248 nodes
   average of 236 nodes
   median of 144 nodes
   Some users have more groups than nodes
   9 / 20
   

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    Survey - results - statistics
    Configuration maturity
    A lot of variance, from little
    techniques to many
    10 / 20
    

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    Survey - results
    All but 2 are using at least
    either Patch Management or
    Hardening System
    Confirms the evolution toward
    Security
    11 / 20
    

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    Survey - results
    12 / 20
    

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    Survey - results
    Why Rudder was chosen (free text):
    ● For Compliance feedback (2 answers)
    ● Because we don’t want to learn a new language (2 answers)
    ● Lightweight agent (1 answer)
    ● Networks flow from the node (1 answer)
    ● Because my boss choose it (1 answer)
    13 / 20
    

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14. All rights reserved
    Survey - results
    What do you like about Rudder (free text):
    ● Ease of use (3 answers)
    ● Web UI (3 answers)
    ● Community support (3 answers)
    ● The Rudder team (2 answers)
    ● Built-in Techniques
    ● Dynamic groups
    ● Stability over time
    ● Reporting
    14 / 20
    

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    Survey - results
    What would you like to be changed in Rudder (free text) 1/2:
    ● The price of subscription (2 answers)
    ● A marketplace to exchange Techniques (2 answers)
    ● Make everything config as code
    ● Out of the box automated upgrade of Rudder
    ● More examples in documentation
    15 / 20
    

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    Survey - results
    What would you like to be changed in Rudder (free text) 2/2:
    ● Support for offline systems
    ● Export to CSV on every tables
    ● Compliance more explorable
    ● Dashboard for guests
    ● Built-in 2FA
    16 / 20
    

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    Survey - takeaway
    Survey was not attractive enough
    ● Probably too long
    ● No rewards for filling it except the satisfaction of helping an open source project
    ● Mostly filled by community users
    Infrastructure of community users is typically smaller than customers
    ● But uses cases are really similar
    17 / 20
    

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    Survey - takeaway
    Rudder is praised for
    ● Its ease of use
    ● The WebUI
    ● The support to community users
    ○ We have the same feedback from customers and paid support
    ● Its reliability
    It’s identical to the global feedback we have from users/customers
    18 / 20
    

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    Survey - takeaway
    Users would like:
    ● Compliance export
    ○ First step in 7.3
    ● Compliance explorability
    ○ Focus of 8.x
    ● Be able to do infra as code
    ○ Focus of 8.X
    ● Marketplace to share Techniques
    ● Cheaper subscription for small companies/entities
    19 / 20
    

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20. Thank you!
    Rudder: What is it, and what makes it different? 2023-02-06, 14:00–14:25, B.2.009
    Rudder: Come and hack with us 2023-02-06, 14:25–15:15, B.2.009
    How do we make Rudder secure? 2023-02-06, 15:55–16:20, B.2.009
    Securing the software supply chain for Infra management tools 2023-02-07, 14:00–14:50, B.3.037
    A journey from Configuration Management to Security of IT systems 2023-02-07, 14:50–15:40, D Aud
    Cross OS security hardening - the practical stuff 2023-02-07, 15:55–16:45, B.3.037
    20
    

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