The public cloud is looking pretty good as a development platform this year and gaining cloud development skills is a top priority for many developers, according to new research.
Of the 3,335 developers surveyed by Zend Technologies about what work they expect to do this year, 61 percent said they expect to use a public cloud for their projects. And, of those going that route, 30 percent named Amazon Web Services as their public cloud of choice; 28 percent did not yet know which cloud they would use; 10 percent named Rackspace; and 6 percent cited Microsoft Azure. ”Other” public clouds came in at 5 percent and IBM Smart Cloud at 3 percent.
These numbers come courtesy of the Zend Developer Pulse. (Zend, a provider of PHP tools, is the same company that broke the news that a surprising number of PHP developers are also Metallica fans.)
In terms of overall types of projects, a whopping 66 percent of respondents said they will be doing mobile development this year – hardly surprising given the glut of smartphones, tablets and app stores flooding the market.
Forty-one percent said they expect to work on cloud-based development and 40 percent said they see big data work in their immediate future. Those cloud and big data numbers seem pretty low given the level of interest around both topics but then again “mobile development” is a broad term that could be interpreted to include cloud work.
Nearly half of those surveyed (48 percent) said they will work on APIs and 45 percent said they will work on social media integration this year. Zend surveyed the developers in November , 2011, and plans to make the Zend Developer Pulse an annual event.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user skuds
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