Automation is the strongest driver of edge computing

Recently, the Eclipse Foundation announced the results of its 2021 IoT & Edge Developer Survey. It provides key insights into the IoT and edge computing industry. It also highlights challenges for developers and opportunities for enterprises.

The Eclipse Foundation survey highlights developer trends focused on edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and security. For example, the results shed light on platform usage, developer concerns, target markets and more. »IoT and edge computing go hand in hand, with one technology influencing the other,« said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. It also reveals what challenges developers will face in the coming year.

The online survey was conducted over a seven-week period (August 26, 2021 - October 12, 2021). Worldwide, 662 developers and executives from a wide range of industries and organizations participated. Key findings at a glance:

• Industrial automation has overtaken smart agriculture as the leading industry for IoT and edge computing applications.
• Security (46 %), connectivity (38 %), and deployment (31 %) are the top three concerns of IoT developers.
• C and C++ are the most commonly used programming languages. Developers prefer Python over Java for edge servers, IoT and edge gateways, and cloud platform development.
• AI (21 %) remains the top edge computing workload, unchanged from 2020, but the number of workloads has diversified significantly.  
• The IoT middleware market is dominated by AWS IoT (37 %), Microsoft Azure IoT (27 %), and Google Cloud IoT Platform (22 %).
• Message broker MQTT is the most widely used technology (44%) in messaging infrastructure.
• While Arm continues to dominate hardware architectures for constrained devices, gateways and edge servers, RISC-V and OpenHW Group CORE-V architectures are seeing strong gains in market share.

The survey data also includes details on edge computing workloads, developer concerns and breakdowns by market. The entire report can be downloaded here. Developers may also be interested to know that version 12 of the Eclipse IDE 2021 is now available for download.