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Report: Kubernetes May Drive GCP Challenge to AWS Cloud Supremacy Among Developers

• By David Ramel
• 06/19/2019

Most research has shown Microsoft's Azure cloud in second place behind perennial leader AWS in market supremacy, but a new report finds Google Cloud Platform at No. 2 in the developer space, perhaps driven by the increased popularity of Kubernetes.

Google created the red-hot Kubernetes open source container orchestrations system, which has steadily grown in popularity since being introduced some five years ago.

As we reported a couple months ago, Kubernetes came in at No. 3 as the "most loved" platform in the 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, in which AWS was two steps down, at No. 5.

Now, in a brand-new survey of some 7,000 developers from dev tooling specialist JetBrains, Kubernetes has been identified as the possible driving force behind GCP being listed as the No. 2 cloud service, ahead of Azure.

To be sure, AWS still exhibits a commanding lead, as it does in pretty much all such surveys:

"No surprises about who is first," JetBrains said. "However, we found that the Google Cloud Platform share is greater for Kubernetes users (41 percent vs. 28 percent for general), which means Kubernetes growth may be driving the popularity of GCP."

JetBrains examined cloud services in the DevOps section of its massive report, which showed Kubernetes use growing rapidly, listed by 29 percent of respondents who were asked about what container orchestration services they used. That's up 13 percent from last year's figure of 16 percent.

Coming in at No. 2 among container orchestration systems was Amazon ECS/Fargate (13 percent of respondents), with AWS's own Kubernetes-based fully managed service, Amazon EKS, clocking in at No. 4 (6 percent).

The DevOps data also showed that private servers still hold a small lead over cloud services among developers asked where they host their databases and/or services and/or applications they or their companies develop, 51 percent to 48 percent.

"Private servers are still slightly more popular than cloud services," JetBrains said. "However, if you dive deeper, you can see that there are a lot of users who use both. They are tending to use cloud service as the principal hosting platform."