Author: Chip Childers

Last week, at Cloud Foundry Foundation, we announced the results of our tenth Global Perception Study (GPS), conducted by ClearPath Strategies. We found that 60% of large enterprises report hosting their IT infrastructure in an increasingly complex multi-cloud environment, 59% of which are giving developers more authority to choose the tools they use to address these new demands. This shift in decision-making is leading to higher levels of abstraction that enable developers to gain greater control over the tools they use to deliver new technologies.

We conducted 505 interviews of IT professionals and execs, more than seven geographies (China, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and the US), in five languages, and according to our results, as enterprise IT and cloud environments become more complex, developers are taking enterprise development strategies into their own hands, adding levels of abstraction and decreasing complexity.

Here are some more highlights:

• PaaS usage has jumped six percent in just six months (41 percent to 47 percent), while serverless usage and container usage are leveling at 14 percent and 37 percent, respectively. While container adoption seems to be stabilizing, it should be noted that those who are using containers are deepening their deployments.

• Productivity and flexibility are key drivers for developer tool selection. When asked how they want to feel when using a tool or technology, 46 percent of developers choose “productive.” Almost two thirds, or 63 percent, of respondents say that a technology’s ability to integrate with their environment is the touchstone that makes technology better.

• Underscoring the increasingly prominent role developers are playing throughout the enterprise, 48 percent of the developers surveyed say leadership expects them to provide details around security features, and a little more than a third say they must establish proof of concepts and provide specific business use cases for new technologies to the executive suite.

• Developers place their highest value (69 percent of respondents) on a proven, mature platform. Sixty-five percent say they place the most value on a platform that delivers a consistent experience. Fifty-nine percent said a platform that integrates new innovations is of the greatest value to their team’s ability to develop software applications.

If you are interested in viewing the full report check it out here: https://www.cloudfoundry.org/climbing-up-the-stack/