Fedora CoreOS Survey

Project Discussion
2

Hi everyone,

First I wanted to thank everyone that answered our survey and shared some really good feedback. It’s really appreciated :pray:

Let’s look at the results, we had 36 complete replies.
The first question was Do you use Fedora CoreOS?
47% replied ‘Yes’, 17% used it in the past and 36% never used it. From the comments, using Fedora CoreOS with OKD or other Kubernetes distributions was mentioned a few times.

Next we asked How informed do you feel about what the Fedora CoreOS team has been working on in the last 6 months?, using a 1-5 scale with 1 being not informed and 5 being well informed. The bottom 2 (1 and 2) combined accounted for 47% of the replies, around 22% considered that they were well informed (5). These results show that we can definitely improve our communication, in particular towards people that are currently not using FCOS which is where we got most of the low scores.
In terms of which tools are the most used to keep up with our communications, both the Community blog and Mailing list received 55% of votes (could select more than one tool), followed by GitHub issues (42%). IRC meetings, Twitter received less votes. The jupiter broadcasting podcast was also mentioned which is quite cool :slight_smile:

In terms of how good the communication was in the last 6 months (1-5 scale with 1 being being poor job and 5 being great job), the results shows that we can do better, with answers 1(17%),2(17%) and 3(33%) counting for 67%.

Then, we asked for suggestions to improve our communication. Some of these came up multiple times.

  • having a weekly/monthly/quarterly newsletter with the major things achieved and what’s next on the roadmap
  • engage more on the fedora-devel list to share about what is happening in FCOS
  • spend more time talking about FCOS and its use case (someone mentioned having evangelists for that)
  • be more present on video format (for example, Fedora’s youtube channel).

We also have a lot of information in our issue tracker but it is not really easy to find and sometimes it is missing higher level context for folks that are not day to day deep into the OS development but are still interested to follow what is happening.

Finally we received more general feedback. FCOS and the interaction with users and community members was praised.

  • “The time I needed help and went to IRC, I was helped in an excellent manner!”
  • “I’m very impressed. The work product is very high quality, issues are addressed super quickly and the team is easily accessible and responsive to questions/concerns.”
  • “Fedora CoreOS is excellent and the team worked hard to make this great featured product.”

There is also some confusion in the community about the direction of FCOS and what are the use cases.

  • “It is an interesting product, but I am yet to find where I can actually use it.”
  • “Make it a bit easier to use in vmware and k8s environments. The butane file is often very, very large :wink: sensible defaults (perl, git, python, openvmtools) would certainly help”
  • “Currently Fedora CoreOS feels unfinished. What is the intended use-case of it out of the box?
    A standalone container OS? For that the entire provisioning concept is way too complex, just installing Fedora Server and starting to run containers is much simpler for a single host.
    A base OS for scaled infrastructure such as a Kubernetes Cluster? But then again to doesn’t contain any Kubernetes specific tooling. No kubelet, no kubeadm, no crio, one has to layer all of this on top, which makes updates a nightmare on the long term.
    Any other orchestrator?
    I would love to see the intended user-journey somewhere in the docs to make it easier to decide whether CoreOS is even fitting my use-case.”

Thanks again for all this great feedback, let’s start the discussion about potential improvements and things that we could try here :slight_smile:

11 Likes