
DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud - sandGorgon
https://www.digitalocean.com/currents/june-2018/
======
brightball
> Serverless computing is in a much earlier stage of adoption, with nearly
> half of developers failing to clearly understand what it is.

I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that
term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1)
it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as
serverless since the functions are still running on servers. It's a made up
term that isn't grounded in reality. It's not serverless any more than a
Heroku Dyno is Serverless.

The first time I heard "serverless" I assumed it was a totally in-browser
application.

~~~
moduspwnens14
> I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that
> term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue

But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though.

The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a
service:"

* S3

* API Gateway

* SQS

* SNS

* Cognito

* DynamoDB

* CloudWatch (logs and metrics)

* Step Functions

In all cases, you are not provisioning or managing servers. Scaling is linear
and costs are linear based on how much you use them, and typically based on
what's actually being used (bytes stored, requests made, etc.) and not per-
node. Because they're all hugely multi-tenant, they also cost almost nothing
to use at low scale.

"Functions as a service" covers serverless _compute_ , but it doesn't cover
the huge architectural difference (from the developer's perspective) between
the services above and rolling your own (for example) S3.

~~~
brightball
All of those would fall under IaaS/PaaS.

If we're qualifying anything on a server that developers don't have to manage
themselves as serverless than anything with an API becomes
serverless...despite all of them actually running on servers.

~~~
moduspwnens14
OK. I guess to me categorizing those things in the same bucket as EC2 or
Salesforce is missing a pretty fundamental architectural difference and
benefit. I'm not claiming "serverless" is an ideal term, but I haven't seen
the case made for anything better.

------
mmilano
Like the Stack Overflow survey, this one does not distinguish server-
side/client-side JavaScript, making it look far more popular than it actually
is when considering the data in context of server-side technologies.

If 100% of the servers were running PHP, the results would likely be 50% PHP,
50% JavaScript.

These survey writers need to modify their question, or add another one
specifically requesting server-side tech so JS can be accurately compared with
server-side only languages.

~~~
mawburn
Do you think a lot of people are running JS in a container for frontend? I
wouldn't consider a webserver container a "JS container", even it were mostly
serving a React/Vue/Angular app.

By the way it's worded, it sounds like the question is specifically talking
about NodeJS.

~~~
java_script
> Do you think a lot of people are running JS in a container for frontend?

Hold my beer. --Frontend developers

~~~
albemuth
If the rest of a web app is running on containers, what's the downside to
having the test/build process for the frontend in a container as well?

~~~
steve_adams_86
I like using containers as a reliable build context. I think it makes tons of
sense.

Once the container's done building, throw it out, take what it built, and
serve it.

I'd personally do this separately from the rest of the web app if possible,
though. I keep frontends in their own repository.

------
lightbyte
Interesting to see the disconnect between hiring managers and what people say
they care about most when considering a job offer (salary). Hiring managers
claim there is a shortage of talent and that they do not care about offering a
higher salary. Perhaps that talent shortage would mysteriously disappear if
they increased their salary offers.

~~~
brightball
The number one thing on that list is "limited pool with relevant skills" and
not an actual talent shortage.

IMO this is more from asking for specific combinations of skills used at a
company than anything else. You need these two programming languages, this
database, this frontend framework, these devops tools and these other skills
would also be beneficial.

Generally, you're better off hiring as "if you are competent with one of these
and willing to learn the others, you should apply". The broader the stack the
more learning curve should be assumed with the hiring process.

But it's not in a lot of cases. This also goes hand in hand with the
professional development opportunities cited at the beginning of for retention
sake.

------
peterwwillis
I realized recently that Serverless is to developers as credit cards are to
college students.

Remember when VMs came out, and people were like, great! Now I can constrain
the resources of my OS! I can run 10 OSes on one machine! I'll save so much
money !

Then we gave individual teams access to create as many VMs as they wanted, and
suddenly all the hardware was used up.

Now do that, but in the cloud, with unlimited resources.

~~~
Steltek
In my experience, those VMs were used briefly then left to rot. Consuming a
large reserve of resources while doing nothing. Serverless should at least
reduce the overhead of orphaned projects out there.

~~~
peterwwillis
There's a secondary problem: when there are more resources, application
development becomes less efficient over time. Even though there will be less
_infrequently used_ resources, the applications will use up resources more
frequently in an inefficient way.

Example: I now need a minimum of 4GB RAM to browse the web, which is insane.
15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at
approximately the same rate.

~~~
kbar13
if you have the resources use them? 15 years ago your browser had a small
fraction of the features a modern browser provides. this argument is tiring.

~~~
noxToken
Which is the problem. Everyone knows that I have resources, so everyone wants
to use them by packing in every feature without any consideration for how much
memory it uses. It's fine if I _only_ wanted to run a browser or _only_ wanted
to run an IDE.

It's not that everyone should always strive to have the minimum footprint
possible. It's that no one cares how big the maximum footprint can be.

------
sandGorgon
Here's the interesting learning for me:

 _While Kubernetes was most popular overall, the smallest companies (1-5
employees) use Docker Swarm more often (41 percent use Swarm vs. 31 percent
that use Kubernetes)._

Did not know Swarm was this popular. Even overall Swarm is 35% to K8s 42%

However, there is a huge proliferation of hosted K8s services - AWS, GCP,
Azure, Digitalocean, tons of others. Nobody seems to be making a hosted Docker
Swarm solution though. I wonder why - is it because the market doesnt exist
because of the simplicity of Swarm itself ? Would be interesting to find out.

~~~
mromanuk
Sadly Docker is replacing Docker Swarm by Kubernetes

~~~
sandGorgon
i think they are being very opaque about their plans and this is hurting their
credibility.

They built the ability the launch k8s clusters through the docker tool. There
are almost no tweets or posts about Swarm instead, their blog is full of
kubernetes posts ([https://blog.docker.com/](https://blog.docker.com/)). Even
their coolhacks section is about "kubeflow". Top rated session at Dockercon
was kubernetes.

i really hope they open up more and talk about their future plans and engage
with the community.

~~~
BretFisher
Um, I was a top rated session that was repeated on Friday and was 100% Swarm,
and had a full house
[https://twitter.com/BretFisher/status/1007099831783862272](https://twitter.com/BretFisher/status/1007099831783862272)

~~~
sandGorgon
Bret - this is not me that's making the claims. Take a look here -
[https://blog.docker.com/2018/06/top-5-rated-sessions-
dockerc...](https://blog.docker.com/2018/06/top-5-rated-sessions-
dockercon2018/)

this is what is scaring us. We love Swarm and really respect all the dev
efforts... but the corporate K8s bias in unmistakable. These are some of the
kubernetes posts over the last 2 days from Docker's twitter account:
[https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1016340701800431618](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1016340701800431618)

[https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015620961712967681](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015620961712967681)

[https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015535938678738950](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015535938678738950)

[https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015475755428597760](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015475755428597760)

Number of Swarm posts in the same time ? Zero. In fact, I would be hard
pressed to find a public tweet about Swarm in a long time.

This was the first Docker event in Lahore -
[https://events.docker.com/events/details/docker-lahore-
prese...](https://events.docker.com/events/details/docker-lahore-presents-
microservice-architecture-using-docker-and-kubernetes#/)

Its Kubernetes everywhere.

------
codingdave
I find it interesting (and perhaps predictable) that while only 11% of people
had a top consideration when taking a job of "Quality of manager or
management", 47% of people cited "Leadership / management was bad" as a reason
for leaving a job.

~~~
fhood
Pretty hard to gauge the quality of management from the outset though.

~~~
codingdave
I'm curious why you think so?

I normally ask questions about various non-tech topics including conflict
resolution, team makeup, strategy, product management priorities, how they
mentor junior team members, etc. Those discussions may not be able to tell the
difference between a good vs. great leader, but they absolutely will raise red
flags from a bad leader.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I disagree. Many bad leaders are very expert at _sounding like_ good leaders
in a way that is hard to detect in precisely this type of situation. There’s
really only two options: seek advice from someone you trust who worked with
those leaders, or else you just have to spend a bit of time working for them
to find out. You cannot tell from interview questions, unfortunately.

~~~
duxup
Agreed, bad management usually shows up when there is a problem / stress
point. That typically isn't the case in an interview.

Granted one time I did pass after an interview after talking to an
inexperienced manager who had no clue....so sometimes, you can tell.

------
jmngomes
Something that puzzled me:

"the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp
vs. college graduates"

While the bulk of work at a lot of enterprises (banks, telcos, etc) are CRUD
apps with some BPM, I did not expect a (hiring) manager to be unable to make
such a simple distinction.

Hopefully it could be the case that 'we don't discriminate based on that' is
simply the polite/legal thing to say, especially considering that the article
goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp
graduate"...

~~~
mieseratte
> "the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between
> bootcamp vs. college graduates"

Since the industry norm is "You're all equally worthless until proven
otherwise" I don't find it all that surprising. They'll take in your resume
and toss you into the pipeline / grinder and if make it through the crucible
unscathed, well, congrats you'll get a job offer!

Being neither a college nor a bootcamp graduate, I've found very few places
give a damn what you've got framed on your wall at home. What matters is if
you can hack it in the real world. The only time I've been turned away for
lack of credential was Booz Allen Hamilton, and they exist to arbitrage you to
the government which still seems to care about proper documents.

> considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled
> any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...

Well, that would mean 52% surveyed have hired a bootcamp graduate which is
pretty surprising to me, personally, since the camp(s) in my metro seem to
produce about two good candidates per cycle.

~~~
hinkley
Yeah. The worst code camp people have been some of the worst programmers I've
ever had to work with. But at the high end? The distinction in success rate is
fuzzier.

Several of my most promising mentees came out of code camps. It convinces me
of something I already 'knew': that good instincts don't come from a college
education, they come from life. But a university _will_ weed out a lot of
dilettantes...

------
aphextron
>Ninety-four percent of our respondents self-identified as men, 5 percent as
women, and 1 percent as non-binary/other.

Seems like this survey was highly self selective, so I'd take the entire thing
with a grain of salt. There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near
96% male.

~~~
jfim
> There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near 96% male.

What do you think is the correct percentage? 96% seems reasonably close to the
anecdotal gender ratio (~1/35 students being female) of undergrads from when I
was in university a long time ago.

------
lakechfoma
The pool of respondents are Digital Ocean customers? I'm assuming that would
exclude employees of FAANG plus basically all really large "enterprise"
businesses. Is that fair to assume?

If that is fair, I wonder how biased these results are. If we included FAANG
and/or big corporations where tech is key but not a cultural staple (e.g.
Walmart) I wonder what the results would look like.

~~~
CM30
It'd also exclude anyone who wanted to host their own site, anyone who stuck
with traditional hosting companies/services, anyone who used a service like
AWS or Azure to host their site/app, etc.

If so, that'd certainly influence the results a lot, and alongside your
examples of FAANG employees and large enterprises, make the survey seem a bit
too biased to be all that useful.

------
drenvuk
This is a nice breakdown but the most interesting thing I see is keeping the
statistics to themselves by posting them to the site as svgs, not images and
not text. You can't highlight them for copypasting even though a screenshot
will work but you can't right click for saving to an image either. Thanks for
the technique.

~~~
quadrature
I'm not sure that was the intention. It's easier to cater to different screen
resolutions with a vector format. You can always take a screenshot if you want
or link to the article.

~~~
drenvuk
I did make an assumption that shouldn't have been made, my apologies. I still
think this is a cool effect that it can be used for.

------
abledon
Has anyone chosen digital ocean over aws/gcp/aZure when building a scalable
setup (for pricing reasons). Eg setting up your own load balancers/ private
master slave dB machines / bunch of ansible to organize it all.

~~~
brightball
Fwiw, Digital Ocean keeps adding more and more options on the service front.
Several storage options, load balancers w/ Let's Encrypt built in, etc.

Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like
RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the
cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of
DO in the first place.

It would be really interesting to see them partner with a known player like
Citus.

~~~
nxie
FWIW, I have found one of the best parts of using Digital Ocean is their
fantastic documentation and tutorials. As a relative newbie, I was encouraged
to deploy to a PaaS such as Heroku but grew frustrated at the black box aspect
of what was going on underneath the hood. The tutorials on DO allowed me to
learn and gain an understanding of how servers really work.

On your point about database services, I was able to set up Postgres on my
droplet with relative ease and it has been serving me well ever since, again
all thanks to clear and well made tutorials. I think if I could do it without
any prior experience, most other people can too. So IMO, these providers
aren't necessary at all.

~~~
brightball
Oh, I totally agree. That's actually how I learned this stuff. Years ago there
was a company called Slicehost that was very similar to what Digital Ocean is
now. It had a treasure trove of great documentation and articles.

Eventually they were acquired by Rackspace and folded into the Cloud Servers
line.

Great company though.

------
gaius
_the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp
vs. college graduates_

Wow. Can this really be true? Maybe strictly a web dev thing?

------
Blackstone4
Interesting to compare the frequently used languages of those using containers
to the Stackoverflow Dev survey.

\- Javascript 57% use vs 71.5% I had always thought JS was high on the
Stackoverflow survey because it included people using it on the frontend. Not
necessarily the case.

\- PHP was third at 36%

\- Golang was fourth above Java

------
geggam
Would have been nice to see what scale these people were running.

Also, if they are only polling developers are these actually production loads
?

Are the developers now doing operational tasks ?

~~~
ac29
> Would have been nice to see what scale these people were running.

26% were in companies of 5 or less people and 50% in companies of 25 or less.
So, this is highly skewed towards smaller scale companies.

------
Illniyar
So it's the result of a survey? That's a bit disappointing. Quarterly report
makes me think it'll be extrapolated from DigitalOcean's usage metrics. Surely
some of the things, such as containers could be inferred from real usage.

Also, unlike stackoverflow, if the respondents were DigitalOcean users I would
imagine some things would be considerably skewed - for instance the popularity
of "Serverless". I assume that since DigitalOcean doesn't offer serverless
products people who use serverless aren't on DigitalOcean.

------
devmunchies
Does anyone know if the graphs and visuals in the post are hand made or are
they using some kind of app with a custom theme?

