Serverless Community Survey - DRAFT

The serverless landscape is constantly evolving, and trying to keep up with the latest innovations and trends is a daunting task. As someone who loves building things with serverless (and sharing that knowledge with others), I wanted to get a better understanding of the serverless community. I find it incredibly helpful to understand how others use serverless, what they are building with it, and the challeges they are facing.

UPDATE: There has been a tremendous amount of feedback and I'm working with some others to incorporate it all. We've pushed the release back a week to Feburary 11th, 2020!

So what's the deal with this survey?

There have been several great serverless surveys, but I wanted to create one for the community, by the community. What questions do YOU want answered? How can the answers to these questions help you further the goal of serverless adoption, either in your organization, or for customers of your product?

Are you open-sourcing the survey results?

YES!!! The raw data will be published (minus any personally identifiable information) for ANYONE in the community to use as they please. Use it to help choose the most popular framework or database for your organization. Discover new use cases that you can shift workloads to. If you're building serverless tools and products, use it to understand which services potential customers are using, what their pain points are, and where they are in their serverless journeys.

How many respondents do you expect?

Hopefully, a lot! In order to run a high quality survey and offer participants a chance to win something, I've partnered with the team at Nuweba to sponsor the survey. They are going to cover survey expenses, host the realtime results, and donate an Oculus Quest and a Nintendo Switch as prizes for participants. They will have access to the same data as everyone else. An email address will be required in order to enter the drawing, but it WILL NOT be used for marketing purposes.

I will also feature the survey in the Off-by-none newsletter and on the Serverless Chats Podcast.

How can I participate?

Below there are some sample/possible questions. Please feel free to suggest new questions, add or change answers to existing ones, or tell me that some of these questions don't make any sense! You can add an ISSUE, send an email to contact[at]jeremydaly.com, or DM me on Twitter (@jeremy_daly).

When will this survey go live?

I'm shooting for a go live date of ~~Feburary 4th, 2020~~ Feburary 11th, 2020, and the survey will run for four weeks.

Possible Questions

Below are a list of possible questions to ask respondents. This is where I NEED YOUR HELP! These are just some ideas that I had with some possible answer, but there are many more questions that could be asked. Your feedback is critical to making this survey a success.

As I get feedback, I'll update the questions and answers. Please do not submit PRs, it'll be too hard to manage.

Also, the questions below are in no particular order, so the final survey will flow better than this list.

1. Which public cloud providers do you use?

Amazon Web Services
Alibaba
Cloudflare
Google Cloud Platform
IBM Cloud
Microsoft Azure
Oracle Cloud
Rackspace
Tencent
Other: ______________
None

2. How long has your organization been running production applications in the cloud?

Less than 6 months
6 months to a year
1 to 2 years
3 or more years
We do not run production application in the cloud

3. How would you describe your current level of serverless usage?

I only work on serverless projects
I mostly work on serverless projects, but sometimes need to do other non-serverless projects
I work on serverless sometimes, but mostly focus on non-serverless projects
I only use it for personal projects, but not at my job
I don’t use serverless at all

4. Before using serverless, what was your level of experience with the public cloud?

I had used multiple public clouds to run production workloads
I had used a single public cloud provider to run a production workload
I had used the public cloud in a limited capacity
I had never used the public cloud before

5. Which FaaS (Functions as a Service) products do you use?

AWS Lambda
Alibaba Cloud Function
Azure Funtions
CloudFlare Workers
Google Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions
Kubeless
OpenFaas
Oracle Functions
FN Project
Knative
Alibaba Cloud
Spotinst Functions
Other:

6. Which container-based products do you use?

Alibaba Container Service for Kubernetes
AWS Fargate
AWS ECS
AWS EKS
Google Cloud Run
Google Kubernetes Engine
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Azure Kubernetes Service
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Other:

7. Which managed services do you use?

NOTE: This could be a long list. Is there a better way to ask this?

8. Which framework(s)/services do you currently use with serverless?

Architect
AWS Amplify
AWS CDK
Serverless Application Model (SAM)
Serverless Framework
Kappa
Sparta
Apex Framework
Terraform
Gordon
Stackery
ClaudiaJS
Zappa
Chalice
Apex
A custom framework
None
Other:______

9. Which services and/or tools do you use to monitor your serverless applications?

Epsagon
Dashbird
AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch ServiceLens
Loggly
CloudZero
Sumo Logic
Thundra
AWS X-Ray
AppDynamics
Serverless Framework Pro
Data Dog
New Relic
Lumigo
Splunk
Azure Application Insights
Other: ____________

10. What security solution do you use for your serverless applications?

PureSec/Palo Alto Networks
Protego/Check Point
Aqua Security
Other: ______________

11. What are your main pain points when using serverless?

Latency (Cold Starts)
Security
Debugging
Monitoring
Vendor Lock-in
Deployments
Cost
Platform Limitations (tmp folder size, duration, etc.)
GPU Support
Other:_____

12. Where do you hear about new updates and technologies related to serverless?

Newsletters
Podcasts
Blogs
Serverless vendor websites/blogs
Medium
Reddit
Tech News
Conferences and Meetups
Webinars
Other: _____

13. What “serverless” databases do you currently use?

DynamoDB
Managed Cassandra
Google Cloud Store
FaunaDB
Aurora Serverless
CouchBase
Azure Cosmos DB
Other: ____

14. What frameworks and tools are you using for orchestration and workflows?

Azure Durable Functions
Azure Logic Apps
AWS Step Functions
Other: ____

15. Which of the following use cases do you use serverless for?

REST APIs
GraphQL
ETL/Data Processing tasks
DevOps/Operational tasks
IoT
3rd party services integration
Security automation
Single Page Applications (SPAs)
Chatbots
Edge computing
Other: ________

16. What do think about the amount of educational materials available for serverless?

Not nearly enough
Some, but very scattered
Some, but easily accessible
Enough, but scattered
Just enough, and easily accessible
Too much
No opinion

17. How likely are you to build a serverless application in the next 6 months?

Very likely
Somewhat likely
Somewhat unlikely
Very unlikely

18. How would you define “multi-cloud”?

Running multiple copies of your application in different public cloud providers
Running different applications in separate public clouds
Running cloud agnostic applications that can be ported between clouds
Running applications that utilize different cloud/SaaS providers (e.g. Stripe, Twilio)
Other: ______

19. How many serverless applications are you running in production?

[enter number]

20. Which roles in your organization decide on creating new services using serverless?

Developer
DevOps
Team Lead
Architect
VP of Engineering
CTO
Other:____

21. How were you affected by AWS Lambda’s Provisioned Concurrency Announcement?

Not affected
Somewhat affected
It changed the way I work
It had a big impact on my job
I didn't know about it

22. Did the latest improvements to AWS Lambdas in VPCs affect your opinion of Lambda and/or Serverless?

Not at all
Somewhat affected
Had a significant effect
Changed my mind
I wasn't aware of it

23. What is the primary language your organization uses to develop serverless applications?

Node.js
Python
Go
Java
Ruby
PHP
C#
Other:____

24. What other languages does your organization use to develop serverless applications?

Node.js
Python
Go
Java
Ruby
PHP
C#
Other:____

25. How would you define your organization?

Enterprise
Medium-sized
Small business
Start up
Side project/bootstrapped

26. How many employees are there in your organization?

Just me
2-10
11-50
51-100
101-200
201-500
501-1000
More than 1,000

27. What is your title?

[enter text]

28. What is your company name? (not to be shared with results)