News

IoT Dev Survey Names AWS Top Cloud Service, Java No. 1 Language

• By David Ramel
• April 30, 2018

The Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud is No. 1 among Internet of Things (IoT) developers, who prefer to work with Java, says a new survey.

For the fourth year, IoT developer preferences were measured in a survey backed by the Eclipse Foundation's Eclipse IoT Working Group.

As in many other surveys concerning cloud computing and programming language choices, AWS and Java again reigned supreme in the new online survey, conducted early this year. While AWS is the overwhelming leader, this survey -- just as with others on various topics -- showed the Microsoft Azure cloud is trying hard at No. 2. In the IoT space, however the Google Cloud Platform is faltering, according to the fourth annual IoT Developer Survey.

"Seeing AWS ahead of the pack is no surprise," commented the point person behind the survey, Benjamin Cabé. "It seems to be the public cloud platform of choice for developers, according to the recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey, and one of the most loved platforms for development in general. And looking at the same survey, it seems Google is not really doing great with their Cloud Platform (it is used by 8.0 percent of the respondents vs. 24.1 percent for AWS).

Indeed, while GCP "is struggling to get adoption from IoT developers," AWS was mentioned as the IoT cloud service of choice by nearly 52 percent of respondents in the Eclipse-backed survey, a 21 percent increase from the 2017 study. Microsoft Azure, meanwhile, was reportedly named by about 31 percent of respondents, a 17 percent hike over last year's survey. Google came in at almost 19 percent share, an 8 percent decrease.

Java, meanwhile, was named the No. 1 overall programming language among respondents (at 66.5 percent), followed by C, JavaScript, Python and C++. Java was also No. 1 when the questions were limited to programming IoT gateways and cloud computing. When limited to constrained devices, however, C, C++ and Python came in ahead of Java, followed by Assembly.

Other survey highlights reported by Cabé include:

• 18 percent of the respondents identified Data Collection & Analytics as one of their top concerns for developing IoT solutions, a 50 percent increase from last year, making it the No. 2 concern behind Security. Connectivity shares third place with Integration with Hardware.
• MQTT remains the standard of choice for IoT messaging, while AMQP is becoming more popular as companies scale their IoT deployments and backend systems.
• 93 percent of the databases and data stores used for IoT are open source software. Data collected and used in IoT applications is incredibly diverse, from time series sensor data to device information to logs.
• Linux remains the undisputed OS for IoT, with Raspbian edging out Ubuntu/Ubunto Core for top honors.
• While security has been the No. 1 concern in every survey conducted, "it is no secret that security is hard, and there is unfortunately still only a limited set of security-related practices that are on the front burner of IoT developers. Communication-layer security (for example, the use of TLS or DTLS) and data encryption remain the two most popular practices, used by respectively 57.3 percent and 45.1 percent of the respondents."

The Eclipse IoT Working Group collaborated with several organizations to promote the survey to different IoT communities between January and March, garnering 502 responses.