The Eclipse Foundation has released results from its 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Survey. The survey reveals that connectivity and security remain two of the top three challenges that IoT developers face. Findings show that connectivity (47%) is the top concern in 2022, followed by security (26%) and data collection & analytics (26%).
The survey finds an increase in security concerns, which indicates developer challenges in determining the right technologies for their applications, according to the report. In addition, the survey reveals a decrease in deployment-related concerns. This “indicates that less solutions are moving past the PoC phase and developers are focusing more on successful solutions rollout to assure overall better user experience,” according to the report.
The most used security-related technology in IoT/edge solutions is communication security, e.g., TLS, DTLS (26%). This is followed by analytics/anomaly detection (24%), data encryption (24%), JSON web token (16%), and over-the-air updates (15%).
Sponsored by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group, and the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group, the annual 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Report, now in its eighth year, surveyed 910 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers in a broad range of industries. The majority (69%) of survey respondents are both open-source committers and users of IoT/edge solutions, which is 20% higher than last year’s survey, said researchers.
The leading industry for IIoT and edge computing technology adoption is agriculture (23%), displacing industrial automation (22%) as the top industry. This is followed by automotive (20%), energy (17%), and smart cities (17%).
Edge computing is making inroads in real-world applications with artificial intelligence (38%) as the most common workload for edge gateways/edge nodes. Rounding out the top four are control logic (34%), data exchange between multiple nodes (22%), and data analytics (20%), according to survey respondents.
(Source: Eclipse Foundation)
The survey also reveals that Wi-Fi (36%) is the top connectivity technology used by IoT developers. This is followed by Ethernet (29%), cellular (22%), and Bluetooth/Bluetooth Smart (20%).
ARM continues to dominate hardware architectures for constrained devices, gateways, and edge servers, with 64-bit ARM architectures gaining ground, said researchers. The leading architectures include AMD/Intel x86-64 (26%), ARM Cortex v8 (22%), ARM v6 (17%), and ARM v7a (15%) for IoT/edge gateways and edge nodes. For constrained devices, ARM Cortex-M0/M0+ tops at 26%, followed by ARM Cortex-M3 / M4 (24%), and ARM Cortex-M7 (20%).
(Source: Eclipse Foundation)
Java (42%) is the most widely used programming language for IoT gateways and edge nodes, according to respondents. This is followed by Python (31%), Javascript (28%), and C (27%).
Other key findings include:
- MQTT (33%) still leads as the most widely used IIoT communication protocol, although researchers report increased fragmentation. There are also slight decreases in HTTP/HTTPS (24%) and REST (22%) communication protocols while alternative communication protocols (TCP/IP, AMQP, in-house/proprietary) have grown in usage.
- While the big three cloud providers continue to dominate, they are losing a little ground: Amazon AWS (36% in 2022 from 44% in 2021), Microsoft Azure (18% in 2022 from 29% in 2021), and Google Cloud Platform (16% in 2022 from 20% in 2021). Researchers report growth in Kubernetes (14%) and other on-premises cloud (14%).
- Container images (49% in 2022 vs. 30% in 2021) are the most used edge computing artifact for edge gateways and edge servers.
The survey data provides more details about edge computing workloads, types of data stored, IoT middleware preferences, operating systems, and programming languages. Survey respondents include developers (37%), executives (18%), and engineering/ R&D management (11%).
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