News

Python Programmers Prefer AWS

• By David Ramel
• 02/07/2019

According to a new survey of Python developers, respondents don't always use a cloud platform, but when they do, it's usually Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS).

The Python Developers Survey 2018 polled more than 20,000 developers from more than 150 countries last fall, resulting in this key takeaway: "55 percent of the Python users who use cloud platforms prefer AWS. Google Cloud Platform comes in second, followed by Heroku, DigitalOcean, and Microsoft Azure. About a third of the respondents don’t use any cloud solutions."

"Along with the popular cloud platforms listed above, we identified that OpenStack and Linode got 6 percent each, OpenShift 3 percent, and Rackspace 2 percent," the report continued.

Other cloud-related takeaways in the report include:

• 47 percent of respondents said that when running code in cloud production environments, they do it in: virtual machines (47 percent); containers (40 percent); on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) (28 percent); serverless (21 percent); other (2 percent); none (13 percent).
• The top five answers to "How do you develop for the cloud?" include: locally with virtualenv or similar (56 percent); in Docker containers (35 percent); in virtual machines (24 percent); with local system interpreter (17 percent); and in remote development environments (17 percent).

Of course, AWS returns the Python love in many ways, such as: a whole section of the company's developer center being devoted to Python, complete with tools, documentation and sample code; an AWS SDK for Python (Boto 3) ; guidance such as Getting Started with the AWS SDK for Python (Boto); projects such as Deploy a Python Web App; and much more.

Some non-cloud takeaways in the survey results published this week include:

• Python 3 adoption rate is growing fast and is already at 84 percent, while Python 2 is used as the main interpreter by only 16 percent of Python users. That's a huge jump in popularity for Python 3, from 75 percent in 2017.
• Data analysis has become more popular than Web development among Python users, growing from 50 percent in 2017 to 58 percent in 2018.
• Half of all developers using Python as their main language also use JavaScript. Python is also frequently used together with HTML/CSS, Bash/Shell, SQL, C/C++, and Java.
• Flask and Django are the most popular frameworks among Web developers. Having equal shares (around 45 percent each), they leave other Python Web frameworks far behind.
• NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, and SciPy are the most popular data science frameworks and libraries. Machine learning-specific libraries such as SciKit-Learn, TensorFlow, Keras, and others are also quite popular.
• In 2018, significantly more respondents reported being involved in DevOps (an increase of 8 percentage points compared to 2017).
• PyCharm with its two editions is the most popular tool for Python development. Interestingly enough, VS Code has expanded from 7 percent in 2017 to 16 percent in 2018, making it the second most popular editor for Python development. Other popular editors for Python include Vim, Sublime and Jupyter Notebook.
• Surprisingly, almost two-thirds of Python developers choose Linux as their development environment OS.

More about the survey can be found in this blog post.