The Eclipse Foundation recently released results from its 2021 IoT & Edge Developer survey that looked at the challenges that developers face and opportunities in the IoT and edge open-source ecosystem. A key finding revealed the top three concerns of IoT developers: security (46%), connectivity (38%), and deployment (31%).
The significant increase in both security and connectivity concerns highlights the challenges developers face in determining the right technologies for their applications, according to the report. In addition, survey respondents indicate increased concern for integration complexity, up from 22% in 2020 to 27%, as the number of deployments increase, requiring additional integrations with complementary technologies and systems.
Sponsored by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group, and the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group, the annual 2021 IoT & Edge Developer Report, now in its seventh year, surveyed 662 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers in a broad range of industries. The majority (55%) of survey respondents work on a mix of IoT & edge computing projects, 24% work exclusively on IoT solutions, and 22% work exclusively on edge computing solutions.
The leading industry for IIoT and edge computing technology is industrial automation (34%), displacing smart agriculture as the leading vertical market. This is followed by agriculture (33%) and building automation (28%). Both energy management and connected/smart cities tied at 26%, a 5% increase over 2020.
ARM continues to dominate hardware architectures for constrained devices, gateways, and edge servers, but the RISC-V architecture, including its CORE-V implementation by OpenHW Group, shows market share gains, said Eclipse.
The leading architectures include ARM Cortex V8 (32%), AMD/Intel x86_64 (29%), and ARM v7-a (27%). RISC-V at 8% and OpenHW Group at 6% are gaining traction, said researchers
Click for a larger image. (Source: Eclipse Foundation)
Developers also prefer Python over Java for cloud platform development (22%), edge servers (20%), and IoT & edge gateways (19%). C and C++ remain the most widely used programming languages for constrained devices. The preferred development tools are Visual Studio Code (37%), Eclipse Desktop IDE (27%), and Notepad++ (20%).
There were some changes in the preferred connectivity technologies compared to last year. The top connectivity technologies cited by respondents are Ethernet 45% (39% in 2020), Wi-Fi 40% (44% in 2020) cellular (LTE, 4G, 5G, etc.) 30% (37% in 2020), and Bluetooth/Bluetooth Smart 24% (37% in 2021).
The survey also found that communication security (43%), data encryption (27%), and analytics/anomaly detection (22%) are the most commonly used security-related technologies for constrained devices, IoT/edge gateways, and edge servers.
Artificial Intelligence (21%) remains the top edge computing workload. However, the number of workloads diversified significantly, said Eclipse. Control logic, data analytics (1 GB+ of local storage), and sensor fusion (data aggregation and filtering) round out the top 4 edge computing workloads.
Other key findings include:
- The IoT middleware market is dominated by AWS IoT (37%), Microsoft Azure IoT (27%), and Google Cloud IoT Platform (22%)
- MQTT (44%) is the leading choice for IIoT communications, followed by HTTP/HTTPS, REST, and others.
- Amazon AWS with 44% usage (+3% in 2021), Microsoft Azure with 29% (-1% in 2021), and Google Cloud Platform with 20% (-7% in 2021) continue to dominate the public IoT and cloud platforms.
Forty-nine percent of survey participants are both open source committers and users. Roles include developer, architect, executive, researcher, development manager, project manager, and consultant.
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