The Eclipse Foundation Releases 2021 IoT & Edge Developer Survey Results

Tuesday, December 7, 2021 - 05:00 by Jacob Harris

– The world’s largest open source IoT community reveals developer trends focused on edge computing, AI, and security, with results detailing platform use, developer concerns, target markets, and more – 

BRUSSELS – DECEMBER 7, 2021 –  The Eclipse Foundation, the world’s largest open source foundation focused on the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced results from its 2021 IoT & Edge Developer Survey. Administered by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group, and the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group, the survey provides essential insights into IoT and edge computing industry landscapes, the challenges developers are facing, and the opportunities for enterprise stakeholders in the IoT & edge open source ecosystem. Now in its seventh year, the survey is the IoT & edge industry’s leading technical survey. 

“The IoT and edge computing go hand-in-hand with each technology influencing the other,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Once again, this survey provides significant insights into what developers are working on and what challenges they face as we move into 2022.”

The online survey was conducted over a period of seven weeks (Aug 26, 2021 - October 12, 2021) during which time 662 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers from a broad set of industries and organizations participated. Key findings include:

  • Industrial automation has displaced smart agriculture as the leading vertical industry for IoT and edge computing technologies 
  • Security (46%), connectivity (38%) and deployment (31%) are the top three concerns for IoT developers 
  • C and C++ are the most widely used programming languages for constrained devices. Developers prefer Python over Java for edge servers, IoT & edge gateways, and cloud platform development
  • Artificial Intelligence (21%) remains the top edge computing workload, unchanged from 2020. However, the number of workloads diversified significantly.  
  • The IoT middleware market is dominated by AWS IoT (37%), Microsoft Azure IoT (27%), and Google Cloud IoT Platform (22%)
  • Message Broker-MQTT (44%) is the top technology used in messaging infrastructure 

The survey data also contains details around edge computing workloads,  developer concerns, and breakdowns by market. The entire report and its ground-breaking insights can be downloaded here.

Eclipse IoT’s knowledge and expertise spanning 10+ years of experience in the field of edge and IoT. Eclipse IoT is home to open source innovation that has delivered some of the industry’s most popular IoT protocols. CoAP (Eclipse Californium), DDS (Eclipse Cyclone DDS), LwM2M (Eclipse Leshan), MQTT (Eclipse Paho, Eclipse Mosquitto and Eclipse Amlen) and OPC UA (Eclipse Milo) are all built around Eclipse IoT projects. Other popular Eclipse IoT production-ready platforms cover use cases such as digital twins (Eclipse Ditto), energy management (Eclipse VOLTTRON), contactless payments (Eclipse Keyple), Industrial applications (Eclipse Kura) in addition to Eclipse Kapua  — a modular IoT cloud platform that manages data, devices, and much more.

To learn more about how to get involved with Eclipse IoT, Edge Native, Sparkplug or other working groups at the Eclipse Foundation, visit the Foundation’s membership page. Working group members benefit from a broad range of services, including exclusive access to detailed industry research findings, marketing assistance, and expert open source governance.

For further IoT & edge related information, please reach us at:

IoT@eclipse.org

Edgenative@eclipse.org

About the Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and over 400 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, distributed ledger technologies, open processor designs, and many others. The Eclipse Foundation is an international non-profit association supported by over 330 members, including industry leaders who value open source as a key enabler for their business strategies. To learn more, follow us on Twitter @EclipseFdn, LinkedIn or visit eclipse.org.

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