In spite of a general industry-wide skeptical wariness for technology surveys, the latest findings from Evans Data in relation to cloud platform usage by developers may provide some interest. In an assessment of cloud-focused programmers with current virtualization technology skill sets, only those developers who use a particular platform were asked to rank the attributes of each platform itself. VMware Cloud Foundry received the highest overall score, IBM's cloud offerings ranked first among developers targeting private clouds, and Google ranked first with public cloud developers.
"The top three competitors were very close, with one appealing to private cloud development, one to public, and Cloud Foundry appealing to both,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data Corp. "This is important because many cloud deployments are hybrid clouds blending private, public, and on-premises instances. Flexibility is key."
The survey looked at 14 different cloud platform attributes and asked users to rate each one for the clouds they use. Cloud Foundry appeared to score strongest in terms of reliability, supplied development tools, and price for service and storage. IBM's top scores included best security, proven expertise, and auto-scaling, while Google was seen as the vendor with the most market potential and best vision for the future.
Vice president of cloud and application services at VMware Jerry Chen has pointed out that Cloud Foundry was recognized for providing choice in terms of being an open PaaS for developers — not only the choice of deployment clouds, but also the choice of frameworks and application services.
The Evans Data User's Choice user satisfaction surveys are not vendor sponsored and are conducted several times a year, focusing on platforms and tools that are important to software development. They are published as a service to the development community and provide user satisfaction scores on technologies such as application servers, software configuration management tools, databases, software development platforms, and developer programs.
