The Eclipse Foundation recently released results from its 2023 IoT & Edge Developer Survey, indicating key trends for edge computing, AI and security. The survey covers a range of topics, including top challenges, best practices for software supply chain security, communications protocols and connectivity, as well as preferences for operating systems, developer languages, edge computing artifacts, container orchestration and hardware architectures.
A key finding reveals that 5G is accelerating IIoT implementations with cellular adoption doubling since 2022, primarily due to 5G penetration. The top connectivity technology is cellular, according to 44% of respondents (22% in 2022), followed by Wi-Fi at 38% (36% in 2022), Ethernet at 38% (29% in 2022) and Bluetooth/Bluetooth Smart at 23% (20% in 2022).
The survey also reveals the importance of software supply chain security for IoT/edge solutions. Seventy percent of respondents reported this as an important issue and essential to their work.
Sponsored by the Eclipse IoT Working Group and the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group, the annual 2023 IoT & Edge Developer Report, now in its ninth year, surveyed 1,037 global industry stakeholders, including developers, executives, engineering/R&D/IT management, hardware and R&D engineers, and product managers across a broad range of industries. The majority (63%) of survey respondents are open-source users of IoT/edge solutions, with 21% actively contributing to open-source projects.
The top two market segments for IoT adoption continue to be industrial automation (33%, up from 22% in 2022), displacing agriculture (29%, up from 23% in 2022) as the top industry. This is followed by a three-way tie between building automation (24%), energy management (24%) and connected smart cities (24%).
(Source: Eclipse Foundation)
Connectivity and security remain the top two challenges that IoT developers face. Findings show that connectivity (52%, up from 47% in 2022) is the top concern in 2023, followed by security (33%, up from 26% in 2022), data collection and analytics (25%, down from 26% in 2022) and deployment (25%, up from 20% in 2022).
The survey also reveals that control logic is the top edge computing workload, according to 40% of respondents, surpassing artificial intelligence (37%). The Eclipse Foundation questions whether this implies “a renewed focus on the practical aspects of delivering real-world solutions.”
(Source: Eclipse Foundation)
Arm continues to dominate hardware architectures for constrained devices, while RISC-V makes inroads, according to respondents. Arm architectures continue to gain ground over 2022: Both the Arm Cortex-M0 M0+ (33%, up from 26%) and Arm Cortex-M3/M4 (33%, up from 24%) usage show substantial increases over 2022, followed by the Arm Cortex-M7 (24%, up from 20%). The Espressif Systems ESP32 (Tensilica Xtensa) is new to the survey, at 22%. The survey also finds that RISC-V architectures from OpenHW Group (CORE-V CVE2, CVE4) are making headway, at 7%.
In addition, gateways and edge devices continue to use 64-bit architectures, led by AMD/Intel x86-64 (28%, up from 26% in 2022). Overall, Arm architectures dominate with the 64-bit v8-A, the v7-A and v6, all in the top four. A new entry is the OpenHW Group CORE-V (CVA6), making its debut at 4%.
Java (36% in 2023, compared with 42% in 2022) is still 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 (26%).
Other key findings include:
- MQTT (49%) remains the top IIoT communication protocol (with MQTT + Sparkplug at 8%), followed by HTTP/HTTPS (27%), TCP/IP (24%) and REST (22%).
- Although 55% of respondents did not use any middleware offerings discontinued in 2022, the withdrawal of IoT middleware providers has created an opportunity for innovators to enter the market, the Eclipse Foundation said. Only 12% of respondents who used discontinued IoT middleware offerings have migrated to a new provider.
- The big three cloud providers continue to dominate: Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 41% (36% in 2022), Microsoft Azure at 27% (18% in 2022) and Google Cloud Platform at 20% (16% in 2022).
The survey data provides more details about edge computing workloads, platform connectivity, challenges and use cases. It also provides recommendations on next steps for IoT developers.
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