It’s SaaS for the gold, followed by PaaS and private clouds

Which cloud models are developers working with? The short answer is – many different models are in play.

In May, we enlisted subscribers to SD Times and News on Monday to help us understand how they are building and testing applications using the cloud, and how they are deploying completed applications into the cloud. We had 425 responses – you can read many of their answers in last week’s Take, “Looking for the action? You’ll find it in the cloud.”

Let’s continue walking through the study. Of those who indicated that they are or soon will be using the cloud, the top 10 responses were:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) 54.4%
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) 40.9%
Private Cloud 37.7%
Virtual Private Cloud 34.2%
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) 32.7%
Hosted Virtual Machines 27.8%
Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) 26.7%
Public Cloud 24.6%
Hybrid Cloud 21.4%
Community Cloud 8.2%

There’s quite a wide range of answers – which may indicate a wide variety of need, or in my opinion reflects confusion in the marketplace. There’s little convergence or consistency in the use of phrases like Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

What about specific technologies being used for cloud computing? The study asked about that as well. The choices were a catch-all – some of them reflected messaging infrastructure, some were application frameworks, and others were presentation-layer technologies. Here are the top 15 responses from those who said they are using the cloud or plan to begin doing so soon:

HTML5 60.9%
.NET 57.3%
Cloud-enabled APIs 53.0%
Virtual machines 44.8%
HTML 38.8%
Java EE 37.7%
REST 35.2%
SOAP 28.1%
SOA 21.7%
JDBC 21.7%
ODBC 16.4%
Spring 10.3%
Hyper-V 10.0%
Rails 8.9%
JAX 5.7%

With the high response for .NET notwithstanding, the most popular programming language for cloud-based development was reported to be Java. The top 15 responses, by those who are doing or plan to do cloud development, are:

Java 59.6%
C# 48.9%
Java Script/ECMAScript 46.4%
C/C++ 28.9%
PHP 28.9%
Visual Basic 18.2%
PL/SQL 17.1%
Python 15.0%
Ruby 14.6%
Perl 9.6%
Groovy 4.6%
Pascal/Delhi 1.8%
Scala 1.4%
Clojure 1.1%
Erlang 1.1%

Are you clear on the meaning of terms like SaaS, PaaS or IaaS? Which technologies and languages are your organizations using?