[DZone Research] Cloud Platforms, Frameworks, and Containers

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Cloud: Serverless, Functions, and Multi-Cloud.

Introduction

For this year's DZone Guide to Cloud, we surveyed 739 software professionals from across the IT industry, asking them questions on various topics about cloud technology. In this article, we take a look at the data around our respondents' favorite platforms, frameworks, and containers, and some reasons for the adoption of these technologies.

Platforms and Frameworks

For 63% of respondents, Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) proved the most popular cloud-based service for software production. And among the three types of cloud platforms (hybrid, private, and public), hybrid platforms were the preferred solution for a slight majority of survey takers (52%). Among respondents who work as web application developers, this number stayed steady, with 51% of web application devs saying they prefer hybrid platforms. For enterprise application developers, hybrid platforms were still the favorite but came in at a slightly higher percentage (58%). For hosting these platforms, 43% of respondents told us they prefer using third-party solutions.

Given the preference among respondents for platform services hosted on third-party servers, let’s dive into the data concerning which services our respondents prefer. In terms of cloud services, 63% of respondents work for organizations currently using Amazon Web Services. The second most used solution, Microsoft Azure, is used by 39% of our respondents’ organizations, which constitutes an 8% growth from our 2017 DZone Cloud Survey. Among those who work in multi-cloud environments, however, both AWS and Azure saw double-digit growth in their adoption rates. 76% of respondents who work in multi-cloud environments report using AWS (a 13% higher adoption rate than among general cloud users) and 52% use Azure (another 13% increase from the adoption rate of general cloud users).

Containers

In recent years, containers have enjoyed a meteoric rise into the mainstream. Though containers have roots in technology that’s two decades old, they saw an explosion in popularity when Docker hit the scene in 2013. The DZone community’s interest in containers mirrors this growth. In our 2016 Cloud Survey, 26% of respondents told us that their organization had adopted container technology. In 2017, this percentage rose to 39%. In this year’s Cloud Guide Survey, 54% of respondents reported that their organization has adopted container technology. And on the other side of the adoption spectrum, only 7% said their organization has no interest in containers.

In accordance with this growth in the popularity of containers, larger portions of developers’ workloads are becoming containerized. In 2017, 49% of survey respondents said they containerized 1-25% of their workload, but, this year, that percentage fell slightly to 41% of respondents. This seems due to the fact that more developers are containerizing a quarter to a half of all their workloads or three quarters to all of their workload. This year-over-year comparison can be a bit tricky to explain in prose, so here’s a more visual breakdown:

• I containerize 1-25% of my workload:

  • 2017: 49% of respondents

  • 2018: 41% of respondents

• I containerize 26-50% of my workload:

  • 2017: 22% of respondents

  • 2018: 8% of respondents

• I containerize 51-75% of my workload:

  • 2017: 16% of respondents 

  • 2018: 13% of respondents

• I containerize 76-100% of my workload:

• 2017: 12% of respondents

• 2018: 19% of respondents

So, people love containers. And, when it comes to choosing a containerized environment in which to work, Docker came out as the clear favorite. 68% of our survey respondents reported that their company uses Docker as their container platform. Red Hat’s OpenShift constituted the second most used platform, with a 9% adoption rate among respondents. If you’d like to explore containers further, be sure to check out the 2018 DZone Guide to Containers: Development and Management.

Conclusion

Now that we've seen how the respondents to our Cloud Surey view and use cloud platforms, frameworks, adn containers, let's quickly compare these results to the wider developer community. In Stack Overflow's 2018 Developer Survey, serverless was listed as the second most loved technology (75%), with AWS being the most loved cloud service mentioned by name (69%). Some other popular cloud technologies in that community were the Google Cloud Platform (63%) and Azure (61%). 

In a report published by RightScale, Docker came in as the most used container technology, with Kubernetes seeing widespread and fast-growing adoption as an orchestration tool for Docker environments.  

Do the results reported in this article match up with your experience as a developer? We'd love to hear about it in the comments!

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Cloud: Serverless, Functions, and Multi-Cloud.