 Thank you very much for coming. This is the Drupal local dev survey results. I'm gonna Go a little bit faster here because I've got a fair bit to cover through so I hope you're all enjoying your Drupal South experience so far I especially hope you enjoyed the splash awards last night. I am very sadly no longer in my tuxedo I was told in no uncertain terms that it could not be worn two days in a row Which I'm very sad about So welcome today welcome today to for those of you that I haven't been lucky enough to meet yet My name is Mike Richardson. I'm the managing director and co-founder of a hosting provider called iron star and I'm also the treasurer on the Drupal South steering committee. So working to help bring you this event I really really hope that you're enjoying it I in star I've just got to do the quick plug is a managed Drupal hosting company working with our partners on mission critical sites Our focus is on providing the highest levels of support and security for sites that absolutely need to be online and protected If that sounds like your site or your sites Please have a chat because I'm pretty confident we could be doing a good job for you Now with that out of the way, this is announcing the 2023 Drupal local dev survey results and just in case You're in the wrong room. There are some other really good talks at the moment. So thank you for choosing to be here This survey was started in 2018 and run in 2019 and 2020 by Jeff Geeling and Chris Urban Who are ex aquia and sadly no longer heavily involved in the Drupal community? Chris has moved on to program management at a consultancy called confluent And Jeff is a full-time YouTuber with nearly half a million subscribers Mostly working on Raspberry Pi's So these surveys focus on asking Drupal developers all over the world about the tools hosts and processes They use to build great Drupal websites I found the data from these surveys in previous years to be really really helpful. We host Drupal websites We build tools for Drupal developers and the insights of this offered were really useful and this year I found myself wanting to get those insights again something a little bit more up-to-date And I reached out to Chris and Jeff to ask if there is an intention to do this again They said no So I asked if they would mind if I took over and started doing that from this year And they very graciously gave me the all-clear to do so So the survey was also translated into three languages this time for the first time so Drupal Drupal is a very English centric tool and I felt that it was important to try and get better quality of data by Getting this into as many other languages We could and allowing respondents who will use English in their daily life for working with Drupal because I don't think that you can Without a little bit of English skill But I felt we might get more responses and better responses if we offered translated versions and that certainly seemed to be the case So I want to take a moment to really think Our translators Marine Gandhi from platform who is also head of the Drupal is the the Drupal Kind of the exact word for it But she's president of audits effectively a Drupal community for all of France So she provided the French translation our very own Jimmy can from Einstein who provided the Japanese translation and Chris Wu Who works at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology who provided the traditional Chinese translation? So thank you to all three of our translators. There was a lot of work that went into that So in 2023 we received 829 responses from 96 different countries We had responses from places like Ethiopia, Albania, Costa Rica, Vietnam and Cuba As well as many of the countries that you'd expect to see I Was very nervous when I put the the survey up for the first time and announced that on Twitter and I Was like okay if I get if I get 50 responses, that's enough to be useful if I get a hundred responses That's statistically significant All the responses being in Australia came in overnight or nearly all of them So every morning for me waking up was really really exciting for the first couple of weeks because I think like I'd wake up And have maybe a dozen responses and I'd wake up the next day with 200 and it was just overwhelming The reach that it had and and I do definitely want to take a moment to thank Everyone not just who completed the survey, but who shared the survey and helped promote it and that includes companies like Acquia platform that sh an amazing developers of Lando and D Dev the Drupal Association themselves who published it on their Twitter and in their newsletter and Many many others So the response is pretty consistent with previous years We had 829 responses this year in 2020. I believe they had just over a thousand Sorry, they had 600 responses in 2020 and just over a thousand responses in 2019 So slightly better than 2020 but 2020 survey kicked off right around the time that COVID kicked off So read into that what you like You can see overwhelmingly the responses that we had were from the United States And then countries like France India and United Kingdom Australia rated quite highly Australia is the 10th highest contributed to Drupal by country as of I think 2021 So that's slightly over represented But that's probably because I'm Australian and I bothered everybody in Australia that I knew Can you throw your hand up if you if you completed the survey? All right, wonderful. Throw your hand up if you didn't know about the survey a Lot of you. Wow. Okay, interesting. I have to find out how to reach you next year so 42 responses from Australia and nine from New Zealand and We asked respondents including including yourself How many Drupal developers work in your current company and the intention here was to gauge How many large organizations are working with Drupal and what proportion of Drupal devs are in smaller companies or even working solo? And so out of these 829 responses nearly 150 are working on their own and keep that in mind because that Will influence some of the other data that we'll look at The majority of sorry the largest cohort is those users working in teams of 25 or more that's more than 25 Drupal developers in one organization Which is astounding to me. So that's really interesting We asked developers which tools they use to provision and manage their local development environments as you might expect Lando and D dev featured very very heavily It's also worth noting that a lot of developers use more than one tool presumably because different projects may be in different Consultancy or different teams are geared for Lando while another project in a different team might be geared for D dev I was initially surprised to see D dev win out overall My own experience is that there are a great deal more Lando users that I deal with day-to-day amongst our customer base and Actually, that was borne out by the data as well because in Australia, New Zealand Lando is the more popular tool And D dev is the more popular tool in the US and if you remember back to the number of responses We got from the US That makes a lot more sense that D dev would edge out overall if it's the more popular tool in North America Spain Germany Czech Republic Austria, I think Italy there as well. So very very popular and Ethiopia So It was also interesting to see that D dev seems to be slightly more popular within larger teams It took me a good five minutes to somehow wrap my head around how to analyze this But you'll sort of see the the blues are a little bit darker on the right-hand side for D dev And a little bit darker on the left-hand side for Lando Again, this might be a reflection that there were more responses for the US and D dev is more popular in the US and the US Has larger Drupal teams We asked people if they thought they'd be using their preferred local environment manager in 12 months time 86% said yes, and the remaining 14% answered either maybe or no In this group the group that said no We saw that the users most likely to switch their local environment manager were using Lando D dev or some kind of lamp-wamp stack On the surface that might seem like Lando users are more likely to switch than D dev users But when you look at the number of users it ends up being about seven percent of users who use Lando may switch and 12 percent of users who use D dev may switch So although D dev may be the more popular tool there might be a little bit more interest in other tools from that cohort In per capita terms, it's mostly bad news for docker for Drupal and doxel who had a total of 83 and 87 users respectively and about a third of those user bases are planning to switch or may switch in the next year So We asked some questions around docker usage about 70% of respondents are using some variation of container based local environment manager Lando D dev and so on the the the question that we asked I wanted to try and gauge as You understand docker more Do you think that docker is more important for local development or less important some of these tools like Lando and D dev make It possible for you to use them without understanding docker and without knowing how so we asked the question How comfortable are you working with docker? And that was effectively Sorry, have I skipped? Yeah, so how comfortable are you working with docker? Sorry, do you think it's important to understand how docker works to be a Drupal dev? Slight majority said yes, we do so we wanted to find out do those users who think it's important Understand it more than the users who don't and that's this graph here. So on the left-hand side you can see We've got a we've got the users who think it is important versus the users who think it's not important And on the right-hand side here, you've got their Comfort level in docker doing certain different tasks. So the most complex task the example We gave was using docker in CICD the simple task is basic tasks docker up docker stop so on or docker run So There wasn't really any difference here I was hoping for something more insightful But the takeaway seems to be if you're Comfortable with docker you think docker is important to know if you're uncomfortable with docker you think docker is important to know so I wanted that to be more dramatic than it ended up being in terms of operating system usage 56% of users are on max Linux with 29% and windows with 15% It's worth pointing out that a fairly large chunk of the Windows users Took the time to point out that they're using WSL on on Windows. So they're running Linux in Windows Who here is developing on Windows? Can you keep your hand up if you're doing it by choice? Okay, all right interesting. Are you using WSL? Yes, yes, okay everyone everyone on Windows is using WSL two of the three Windows users who are in the room There because they want to be which is really good if we look at The district the way it breaks down by more specific versions I didn't ask for specific versions of Mac OS Because I didn't think it would really matter within two months of Mac OS being released 90% of people have updated There are more Windows 10 users than Windows 11 There are vastly more Debian based Linux users than anything else. Who is developing on Linux? I Okay Three all right. So same number of Linux and Windows users here very interesting I'm sure that changes by you know the country that you're in the economic status of that country Like how easy it is to afford a Mac versus how easy to support a Linux laptop and so on So I thought that was really interesting And we also asked users what IDE or editor they use. We asked the question What is the primary IDE that you use? We've got a lot of feedback that people wanted to specify more than one Overwhelmingly this is the comment that we got more than any other comment in the survey was I use more than one IDE I want to be able to say that I use more than one idea So PHP storm is still the IDE of choice very closely followed by VS code There were three VS podium users, which is the very open-source version of VS code And it would have been nice to see a little bit more adoption for that From my own little bubble, I would have expected to see more Vim slash Neo Vim users I've seen a few people switch lately It's what I use and in my little my little bubble. I thought we'd see more but it was only 3% of respondents When we compare that to previous years 2019 in blue 2020 in red 2023 this year's survey in yellow You can see that the change in market share is really PHP storm and VS code Taking market share away from the smaller What future that means for for for those smaller editors? I don't really know But it's interesting to see that yeah VS code and PHP storm aren't really taking users away from each other They're taking users away from other platforms We asked some questions about quality assurance we asked which quality assurance controls teams were using and Keeping mostly the same answers that were found in the 2020 survey. So for example, there's nothing wing it fingers cross Fingers crossed. That's not me. That's that's that's some Jeff and Chris So I was initially surprised that only 65% of respondents are even doing peer code reviews But then I remembered that 17% of responses are solo devs So that makes a little bit more sense in that context Also worth noting is when compared to previous when compared to the 2020 data our Quality controls have improved quite significantly 40% peer code reviews in 2020 versus 65% in 2023 So that's really great to see although there is a small uptick in responses for those who are just winging it There were also some really great answers like chaos and madness and everything else because I knew there was a free-form option there So we asked respondents if they'd feel like they'd be working with Drupal one year from now with 1% saying no and 95% saying maybe I Don't know if that's a high number or not. This question hasn't been asked in previous years Is there anyone here who is thinking they might not be working with Drupal in a year? One okay, interesting. You're not working with Drupal that much at the moment though. Are you no, okay? So I kind of would have expected that added at a Drupal conference, but it is interesting I don't know if that number represents a lot I don't know how it compares to other things like how many larval developers are thinking of moving or how many WordPress developers are thinking of moving But that was interesting nonetheless I Wanted to see if there was a potential reason for this I can't quite see my slides on this little screen, which is why I keep turning away and I'm sorry if that cuts off the audio I wanted to see if there was Some tool that these developers who were thinking of leaving are using consistently. Maybe they're all larval devs now Maybe they're all WordPress devs now So on the left hand side you can see the respondents who said they're thinking of sorry whether they're likely to keep using Drupal in 12 in 12 months They are Overwhelmingly WordPress users so if you're a WordPress user statistically you're more likely to stick with Drupal on the right hand side There really wasn't a breakthrough there if you're not if you're thinking you won't be using Drupal in a year There is no system that you're more likely to be using than any other We asked respondents if they'd worked on any decoupled or headless projects this really surprised me because I expected this might be 10 or 20 percent, but 44 percent of respondents are working on headless projects I'm going to do the hands-up thing again in the room. How many of you have worked on a headless project in the past 12 months? Okay All right, so that's roughly the same perhaps a little bit smaller We asked respondents who they used to host their production websites and we got a lot a lot of answers This was a multiple choice obviously a lot of people just like they're using different ideas or the different using using different local dev Managers most of us are using more than one hosting provider except me of course. I'm only using one The variation in answers posed a challenge in how to interpret and collect certain responses. So for example There were there were many responses for all the different kinds of self-hosting everything from bare metal to Kubernetes to not self-managed Lagoon, but self-managed Kubernetes Eks ECS all this sort of stuff. So I just sort of aggregated those all into unspecified self-hosting so that they would Effectively show up on this. So globally You can see that AWS is the host that people are using more than anything else Acquire and Pantheon platform in the top four No surprises there And not surprisingly when looking at Drupal pass providers, we see those three providers And there's no clear winners in the hosting game The responses locally from the Australia NZ market are quite a bit different We see that Acquire loses out its top pass spot to amazing which is likely buoyed by GovCMS And there's strong presence in the NZ market Pantheon also drops quite a few spots down to 5% presumably because of their late entry into the local market and When compared to providers like platform and Acquire And we see a good representation for locally owned providers like Einstein, Skipper and Catalyst cloud Which is really great to see. So if you're among those users, thank you for buying local We asked This is looking back at the global numbers now I thought it would be interesting to see how the major providers change when you look at the organization size I hosted an agency leaders dinner on Tuesday night and we asked the question based on agency size Where are you hosting and are you partnering with hosting providers and overwhelmingly larger agencies partner with hosting rather than doing their own hosting And that sentiment seems to be born out here as well Larger organizations are more likely to use a professional Drupal host than trying to host it themselves Even if those larger organizations are more likely to have the scale and capability internally to be able to hire and train that team and buy that infrastructure So if you're if you're in a small company and you're doing your own hosting, there may be data points There may be some data in there that's worth having a think about I've got the exact same text for this slide. What are we looking at? How did I get that in there? Let's move on All right security controls we asked which security controls respondents were using to protect their Drupal sites What you see here is adoption of each control type out of only people who answered this question There were a hundred and forty three people or about seventeen percent of respondents who didn't answer this question Whether or not that means that they have no security controls or not. I don't think so What I think that means is that this question is towards the end of the survey Which only took about ten minutes, but I imagine a fair bit of fatigue is starting to set in at this point It's great to see that about forty four percent of respondents are using some form of advanced authentication controls for their Drupal sites Whether that's two-factor authentication or single sign-on. I would love to see that value increase next year and Next year will think to expand this to ask about more advanced controls like workstation security Since there are more attacks much more sophisticated attacks that are taking place and using things like workstations and And that as a as a as a vector But clearly we can be doing more as a community to encourage adoption of even the most basic security controls If you're interested and maybe if you're a dev and you're having a hard time selling the the time and resources needed in order to do things like Putting in a WAF or putting in two-factor authentication in your sites I did a talk a Drupal con Prague last year that was specifically aimed at non-technical decision-makers And and and sort of talking about what some of these controls are that they can turn on I think there was about nine and how relatively straightforward and cost-effective they are and the impact that they'll have on security So if you if you I was this link is way too long to say out loud, but if you're interested in seeing that Finally a quick look at web server popularity This is similar to the way that IDEs broke down with two vendors clearly having complete market share I thought it was interesting to note that there's still a couple of die-hard IIS users I'm sure that's not by choice and a couple of light speed users, so People still aren't doing PHP on Windows for whatever reason It's interesting to me to see how engine X has overtaken Apache as the main web server for Drupal sites Hopefully that's going to lead to more engine X centric content on Drupal dot org telling people who want to use Engine X how to configure it appropriately for Drupal because right now everything's pretty much Apache focused even though it doesn't have the majority market share That's it for the survey results. Thank you I think we will definitely be doing this again next year. We learn a tremendous amount in doing it this year We're going to publish the results on our website in the next two to three weeks And we'll be mailing out if you did submit the survey and you signed up with your email address to find out To have the results emailed to you when they come out. They should also be coming out in the next two to three weeks. So Are there any question? Great question. I don't know. It will obviously be next year. I'm hoping to Share the results at Drupal cons So it will probably be timed so that it runs maybe two months before Drupal con Portland or possibly Drupal con Europe, but the goal is to have it be early in the The fact that there were other local environment managers other than Lando and D Dev that still have pretty pretty good usage Like if we go back To all the way back at the beginning Yeah Lando and D Dev have the main market share But there's still a lot of people who are doing their own custom Docker installations A lot of people who are still doing their own lamp lamp stacks. So really That that surprised me the use of homebrew surprised me doc Sal and Docker for Drupal even though those users have suggested like one third of those users are probably going to disappear I would have thought it was just going to be Lando and D Dev with you know, 80% of the respondents only ever really using Because those are by comparison Significantly more mature platforms in my opinion. I know that's very contentious, but that's what I've seen No responses from Russia or Ukraine. No, I didn't remove them. No, definitely not So going back to the the global charts There there were No, Ukraine is in there Ukraine It's there Ukraine eight responses. No, that's okay. Yeah, it is it is on the map there So yeah, eight responses from Ukraine. There were no responses from Russia. I didn't do anything to remove any of that data I think it's probably worth pointing out that that's from people who know what their web server is So an Acquia customer or even an amazing customer probably doesn't know exactly what they're running for their web server Excuse me, so it's it's it's you know If in terms of usage, it's probably different But I don't think it matters because if we're if the intention is to help people use whatever their web server of choice is Those users who know what web server they're using more of them want resources for engine X I'm probably five questions too late for that, but I guess the question was it's it's interesting that engine X is more popular than than Apache So the question is is my aim with this because I'm making little comments and observations and anecdotes as I go through and So the so Murray's question is am I doing this because I want to influence the results or is it just to report back And honestly the answer is both I'm doing this because I needed this data We're building tools for Drupal developers and and it was really important to us so for example if we're building a local environment manager and Overwhelmingly people are using Apache our preference for engine X might not be appropriate So that was part of the reason for doing it the the little anecdotes are partly to just keep things interesting but also because Everyone's got a narrative. Everyone's got a story. They want to tell But also the results themselves. I think We're not the only ones building tools for Drupal. We're not the only ones working with Drupal, and I think there are Really important insights that we can take out of this I keep pitching this idea of like the larger the company is the less likely they are to do their own hosting So I think that's personally I think that's really important for small organizations that are struggling to do their own hosting and probably not of the Scale and experience to be able to do that properly and securely That's that's an important message for me personally cool All right, I really appreciate everyone coming along and Thank you, and I really hope you enjoy the rest of Drupal South