News

AWS Is Top Choice for IoT Development, Survey Says

• By David Ramel
• 04/30/2018

The Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud is the top choice for Internet of Things (IoT) development, according to a new survey.

Coordinated by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the online survey reflected the results of other surveys on different topics when it comes to cloud computing: AWS is the overwhelming leader, and 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 dev platform 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.

AWS has courted IoT developers and enteprises with several initiatives, including: easing device connection with its IoT Core; revamping the pricing of its IoT platform; integrating the platform with Salesforce; introducing an IoT Button for the enterprise; offerin AWS Greengrass for extending cloud functionality to IoT-connected devices; just taking AWS IoT Analytics out of preview; and much more.

Beyond the preference of the AWS cloud among respondents, 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.
• 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.