# Molecule driver culling of 2023

As part of the effort to revive molecule project some drastic measures were put in place.

Unmaintained drivers archived on January 5th, 2023: openstack, goss, libvirt, alicloud, vmware, digitalocean, kubevirt, lxd, inspec. Anyone wanting to **revive and maintain** one of these will have to make a pull request against molecule-plugins repository.

The relatively active drivers were moved to [molecule-plugins](https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule-plugins) repository, where we expected them to be maintained by the community.

### Which drivers should we still see in addition to delegated?

* azure
* docker
* containers
* podman
* ec2
* gce
* vagrant

### How did we measure the driver popularity?

With a simple [sourcegraph](https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+file:molecule.yml+content:%22name:+.*containers%22&patternType=regexp&sm=0) search, we can get an use count for public repos. Here are some of the results:

pie title Popularity of molecule drivers on github
  "docker" : 3700
  "vagrant" : 1300
  "delegated": 944
  "ec2": 272
  "gce": 269
  "podman": 189
  "openstack": 49
  "azure": 20
  "containers": 19
  "vmware": 11
  "lxd": 2