[DZone Research] Expectations vs. Reality: How Developers Select a Cloud Environment

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 dive into the data concerning the ways developers perceive the cloud vs. the benefits they actually reap from the cloud. 

Perceptions vs. Reality

The Good

Due to the popularity of cloud-based platforms, services, and solutions, people tend to come into a cloud environment with a certain set of preconceived notions about the cloud. These preconceptions revolve around both the benefits that developers hope the cloud will bring to their work as well as the drawbacks they feel are inherent to the technology. In terms of benefits, 76% of respondents said they hoped for higher availability and 75% look forward to greater scalability. These were the two largest expected benefits of cloud reported, but some other highly expected benefits were faster access to infrastructure (58%), managed services (52%), and faster time-to-market with applications (51%). Do these expected benefits align with the reality of cloud adoption, as experienced by our respondents? Yes and no. The rankings of the benefits remained the same, but their percentages decreased rather noticeably. When asked what benefits they currently get from a cloud platform, 66% said higher availability, 64% told us greater scalability, and 49% said faster access to infrastructure.

The Bad

Developers also come into cloud environments with negative preconceptions of the technology. When we asked survey-takers what issues they expected to encounter with the cloud, 53% said cost issues, 48% said integration issues, and 44% said security. But, here again, the reality of the cloud has run counter to people’s expectations of it. When asked what issues they currently experience with their cloud platform, 41% reported cost issues, 39% said integration issues, and 30% reported security issues. Much like expected vs. actual benefits, the issues respondents thought inherent to cloud platforms proved far less pesky than expected.

The Importance of Cloud Security

One of the more interesting divergences here is the 14% difference between respondents who expect security issues and those that actually experience them. With the ever-increasing importance of data security, it’s no wonder so many are wary of security issues. And when it comes to the most important factors that influence respondents' decision to adopt a cloud provider, security comes in first. Indeed, 78% reported security as the most important factor when deciding on a cloud provider, followed by performance (75%), price (74%), and scalability (72%). Interestingly, however, these priorities seem to change depending on the cloud provider in use. Among respondents who use AWS, 78% reported security and performance as their top two concerns. Among Azure users, 84% stated security as the most important factor to adoption, followed by performance at 76%. Of respondents who use Google Cloud Services, however, 82% reported pricing as the most important factor, with security coming in second at 80%.

Given the importance of security in the way developers go about selecting their cloud providers and environments, let’s take a moment to dive into the security factors that play a role in which provider or platform developers choose. Among the respondents to our survey, the encryption of data came out as the clear winner. When asked which cloud security factors are most important when selecting a cloud provider, 68% reported the encryption of data, 58% said authentication options, 56% said firewalled servers, and 51% reported SSL termination and load balancers. This impetus on the encryption of data proved ubiquitous across users of different cloud providers. Of those respondents who use AWS, 73% told us the encryption of data was their number one security concern, with authentication options coming in at 62%, a distant second. 71% of Azure users and 70% of Google Cloud Services users said the encryption of data was their highest security concern. If you’d like to dive into the question of security further, feel free to check out the 2018 DZone Guide to Security: Defending Your Code for in-depth analyses and tutorials.

Conclusion

Cloud is a sub-field of software development that is highly dependent upon trends in other sub-fields. As DevOps processes continue to become the norm for more and more developers, and security and the DevSecOp movement continue to gain in importance, the trends discussed in this article will continue. 

Has your experience with the cloud matched your previous perception of this technology? Tell us in the comments!

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