The Eclipse Foundation announced results from its 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Survey administered by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group, and the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group. Now in its eighth year, the survey is the IoT & edge industry’s leading technical survey.
“IoT and edge computing are arguably the most important technologies today, particularly for industries like industrial automation, agriculture, and automotive,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The insights detailed in this survey report can help guide internal developer teams and technology decision-makers as they seek to bring the Industrial IoT to life.”
- The online survey was conducted from April 1, 2022, to June 15, 2022, during which 910 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers from a broad set of industries and organizations participated.
- Java, C, and C++ are the most widely used programming languages for constrained devices. Developers indicate that Java is the preferred language for IoT gateways and edge nodes.
- MQTT continues to be the most widely used IIoT communication protocol, though there seems to be increased fragmentation. HTTP/HTTPS and REST show slight decreases in IIoT usage compared to 2021, while alternative communication protocols (TCP/IP, AMQP, in-house/proprietary) have seen noticeable growth.
- Agriculture (23%) has emerged as the leading industry for IIoT and edge computing technology, followed by industrial automation (22%), automotive (20%), and energy & smart cities (17%).
- Concerns around security have nearly doubled in this year’s survey, making it one of the top 3 challenges developers face, along with connectivity, and data collection & analytics.
- There is increased public cloud fragmentation, and the big three are being challenged. Despite continued dominance, Amazon AWS with 36% usage (-8% in 2022), Microsoft Azure with 18% (-11% in 2022), and Google Cloud Platform with 16% (-4% in 2022) have all lost ground against a growing competitive landscape.
- Container images (49%) are the most frequently selected edge computing artifact.
