Getting to Know the Cloud Developer

February 17, 2017

Cloud developers are multi-faceted. They have to understand DevOps principles, security requirements, performance testing and monitoring, and much more. And because they are required to have a firm grasp on these additional concepts, it can be hard to target them with the right resources, marketing messages, and tools.

We surveyed the DZone audience to get more insight into their cloud work habits, preferences, and the things that influence their decisions. The full survey results are published in the 2017 Guide to the Cloud: Native Development and Deployment.

High-level findings:

Java is their primary language used at work — 59.1%.
Team sizes range from 2-5 people (38.2%) to 6-10 people (27.4%).
Primary job roles are Developer/Engineer (29.5%), Developer team lead (21.7%), and Architect (19.7%).
About 86% are using cloud fundamentals to develop web applications/services (SaaS).
Cloud professionals are knowledgeable and skilled, with 52% having 10-20 years of IT experience.

They also love to learn — with 85% saying they read online articles and tech websites to stay current on the latest in cloud news and trends. And 73% also said they use online classes and training.

Chart Developers Skills

Then it gets serious:

Factors that influence cloud provider selection, ranked in order of importance:

Security
Performance
Scalability
Support
Price
Reputation
Free trial
Variety of features

Cloud security factors that influence selecting a cloud provider, ranked in order of importance:

Firewalled servers
Encryption of data
Authentication options
SSL termination on load balancers
Location of data
Dedicated servers
Cloud-native VPN

We also asked the DZone audience what issues they expect to experience versus those they currently experience.

The most anticipated issue regarding cloud development is changes in internal processes/guidelines. Incidentally, that is the same issue they are currently facing.

Cloud Developers on DZone

To get a little more perspective on our cloud audience, we dove into our database and found:

Majority of our cloud audience is male – 89%.
They are between the ages of 25-34.
Prefer to read tutorials, opinions, and research-based articles.
Are from Germany, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and India.
Are technophiles, shutterbugs, movie lovers, and mobile enthusiasts.

Image title

Future of Cloud, According to Execs

DZone Research Analyst, Tom Smith, talked with 15 executives from 13 companies on the state of the Cloud industry in 2017. He talked to:

Nishant Patel, CTO, and Gaurav Purandare, Senior DevOps Engineer, Built.io | Sacha Labourey, CEO and Founder, CloudBees | Jeff Williams, co-founder and CTO, Contrast Security | Samer Fallouh, V.P. Engineering, and Andrew Turner, Senior Engineer, Dialexa | Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud | Jack Norris, S.V.P. Data and Applications, MapR | Michael Elliott, Cloud Evangelist, NetApp |Faisal Memon, Technical Product Marketing, NGINX | Seth Proctor, CTO, NuoDB | Pedro Verruma, CEO, rethumb | Pete Chadwick, Director of Cloud Product Management, SUSE | Nick Kephart, Senior Director Product Marketing, Thousand Eyes | Dmitry Sotnikov, V.P. of Cloud, WSO2

Key takeaways:

The biggest obstacle is security.
Need to understand and manage the code lifecycle and deployment.
When searching for a new cloud partner, scalability, stability, and ease of use are the most important factors.
Adopting a cloud vendor is more than just a technology decision – it’s much more than that!
There is a lack of knowledge and skills when it comes to setting up and running secure platforms – a shortage of DevOps skills.

Read all of Smith’s insights in the articles below: