News

AWS Falls from Favor in New Stack Overflow Developer Survey

• By David Ramel
• 04/09/2019

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform didn't fare as well in the new 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey as it did in last year's report, dropping down a notch in the "most loved" platform category and others.

Last year, AWS came in at No. 3 among most-loved platforms (reflecting the percent of developers who are developing with a technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it) behind Linux and serverless.

In this year's report by the question-and-answer software development site, AWS is at No. 5 in that category, behind Linux, Docker, Kubernetes and Raspberry Pi, but just ahead of MacOS.

Among most popular platforms (most commonly used), AWS was again at No. 5, behind Linux, Windows, Docker and Android -- and again just ahead of MacOS. Last year, it was at No. 4 behind Linux, Windows Desktop or Server, and Android.

One area where AWS did climb in the standings was the most-wanted platform category (reflecting the percentage of developers who are not developing with a technology but have expressed interest in doing so). Here, AWS was at No. 2 (listed by 16.5 percent of respondents) behind Docker (21.1 percent). Last year, AWS was at No. 3, behind Android and Raspberry Pi.

"Linux is once again the most loved platform for development, with both Docker and Kubernetes also highly loved this year," the 2019 Stack Overflow report said. "WordPress is the most dreaded development platform, and many developers say they want to start developing using Docker and AWS."

Another area where AWS has fallen off is in databases. Last year's "most-loved database" listing saw Amazon RDS/Aurora (No. 4), Amazon DynamoDB (No. 11) and Amazon Redshift (No. 17) make the list. This year, however, only DynamoDB made the list (which included only 13 items) at No. 9. Similar results were found in the "most-loved" database ranking.

Other highlights of the survey as summarized by SO include:

• Python, the fastest-growing major programming language, has risen in the ranks of programming languages in our survey yet again, edging out Java this year and standing as the second most loved language (behind Rust).
• Over half of respondents had written their first line of code by the time they were sixteen, although this experience varies by country and by gender.
• DevOps specialists and site reliability engineers are among the highest paid, most experienced developers most satisfied with their jobs, and are looking for new jobs at the lowest levels.
• Of the top countries on our survey, China has developers that are the most optimistic, believing that people born today will have a better life than their parents. Developers in Western European countries like France and Germany are among the least optimistic about the future.
• When thinking about blockers to productivity, different kinds of developers report different challenges. Men are more likely to say that being tasked with non-development work is a problem for them, while gender minority respondents are more likely to say that toxic work environments are a problem.

Methodology for the 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey says it's "based on a survey of 88,883 software developers from 179 countries around the world. This is the number of responses we consider 'qualified' for analytical purposes based on time spent on the full, completed survey; another approximately 400 responses were submitted but not included in the analysis because respondents spent less than three minutes on the survey."