DigitalOcean Currents: December 2017

In September we shared the results of the first DigitalOcean Currents survey and now we’re back with some fresh data and key insights for the coming year. Technology moves quickly, so by sharing our latest findings each quarter we hope to provide some insight on what is important to developers and what trends are taking hold in the industry.

Among other findings we learned that:

• Linux continues to dominate the server ecosystem. 89 percent of respondents report it as their preferred server operating system.
• Almost half of our respondents (46 percent) reported they would be likely to look for a new job in 2018.
• Among those job seekers work environment and culture was the most important factor when choosing a new employer.

Methodology

In November we reached out to our followers on social media, subscribers to Infrastructure as a Newsletter, and the members of several technology-focused Reddit communities. We asked what was important to them, what challenges they faced in 2017, and what they are looking forward to in the year to come. We offered each participant a $5 gift card to our online store for their participation. We expected the results to reflect the view of our developer community and did not ask directly about any services we provide or about cloud hosts in general.

AI & Machine Learning Will Continue To Be Hot Topics in 2018

AI/ML is already an incredibly hot topic among developers with new applications, for these new technologies appear almost daily. We found that while only 17% had worked with these technologies in 2017, 73% of those who had yet to dive into these areas were planning to learn more about AI/ML in 2018. Anticipating this interest, DigitalOcean has started creating new content to help developers to learn about AI/ML along with a Machine Learning one-click application image to allow them to try out these tools quickly.

Many Don’t Believe They Can Benefit From Continuous Integration

Over the last couple of years, automation in the form of continuous integration and development has become very popular because of its ability to create a seamless DevOps process, from writing code to deploying it to production. 42% of our respondents report using these workflows already. Of those that are not already using CI/CD, 46% do not believe that these methods are needed for their workflow and 38% have plans to implement CI/CD in the future.

Let’s Encrypt is Dominating the SSL Certificate Market

Since launching in 2016, Let’s Encrypt, which provides free SSL certificates, has become tremendously popular with a massive 67% of our respondents reporting that it was their provider of choice. The next most popular provider was Comodo at 8%.

In order to bring you the most recent information, DigitalOcean Currents will be shared every quarter, highlighting the latest trends among developers.

If you would like to be among the first to receive Currents each quarter, sign up here. You’ll receive the latest report each time it is released, can share your ideas on what topics we should cover, and can choose to be among those asked to share your views and experiences in our next survey.

Read more about these and other findings in the full report. Download the full currents report here.