If your organisation is not allowing its developers to use container technologies, then you will very soon be in the minority, according to the latest analysis from DigitalOcean.
The company, in its latest quarterly Currents report assessing developer trends in cloud computing, found 49% of devs are now using containers in some form. Of that number, JavaScript (57%) was the most popular language used with them, ahead of Python (46%), PHP (36%), and Go (28%). Three in five (60%) said they were using containers both for testing and development and production, while three quarters (78%) of those who aren’t using containers today still plan to adopt them.
Scalability is the name of the game for container adoption according to the report, with 39% of respondents citing it as the key aspect. Simpler software testing (24%), quicker software testing (23%) and avoiding vendor lock-in (10%) were also cited.
Not altogether surprisingly, Kubernetes is the biggest game in town. 42% of those polled say they use it, compared with 35% for nearest rival Docker Swarm. Red Hat’s OpenShift (5%), Apache Mesos (3%), and CoreOS Tectonic (1%) all polled negligibly. Yet smaller companies are more likely to be Docker houses – of those with five employees or fewer, Docker Swarm (41%) won out over Kubernetes (31%).
Compared with a relatively strong consensus on where container technologies sit, developers’ knowledge and enthusiasm over serverless computing was somewhat split. Only half of those polled said they had a strong understanding of it, with four in five of those who don’t (81%) saying they plan to do further research this year. Around one in three – 35% for the US, 32% for the UK – say they have deployed applications in a serverless environment over the past year, with AWS Lambda (58%) the most popular platform, ahead of Google Cloud Functions (23%).
With this in mind, what should prospective employees and their employers be looking for? 39% of devs polled said their top considerations for new jobs were a competitive salary and opportunity for internal growth, while the company product (17%) and freedom to use particular technologies (23%) were lower down on the list. The research also found that many developers are still going down the traditional college route – more than half (51%) said they went to college, compared with only 6% who attended a coding bootcamp.
The report polled more than 4,800 respondents, with more than half (55%) saying they were developers, 13% working in DevOps and 10% saying they were students or managers respectively.
You can read the full report here.