These questions were only shown to respondents who had indicated “DevOps Engineer / Infrastructure Developer” as one of their job roles, and to 1/5 of all other respondents taking the survey, chosen randomly.
DevOps
Infrastructure development
It is not surprising that DevOps engineers are more involved in infrastructure development than other developers.
The salaries of DevOps engineers are higher than those of developers in general.
The distribution of shares with respect to the main platforms for which Docker users develop matches the distribution among the general developer population: Web Backend (88%) and Frontend (65%). On the other hand, the shares for Server / Infrastructure (44% vs 26%) and Cloud (29% vs 17%) are vastly different from the shares for those categories among the general developer population.
Docker users are 3 times more likely to be found working as DevOps engineers or infrastructure developers, 2 times more to be architects, and 30% more likely to serve as team leads. They are also more likely to have a senior position.
Developers who use Docker Compose prefer Linux (64% vs 47%) and macOS (58% vs 44%) more than developers do in general, and they also use Windows as their development environment at significantly lower rates than the overall developer population (44% vs 61%).
The market for configuration management tools has not changed. Ansible remains the most popular choice, while second place belongs to custom solutions.
It is interesting that a plurality of developers who are not involved in DevOps use custom solutions for configuration management relatively more often, while DevOps engineers tend to prefer listed solutions.
Interesting fact
DevOps engineers are more likely than other developers to use the Go and Shell scripting languages, while they are less likely to use C or C++.
Curiously, people involved in DevOps use TypeScript at higher rates and JavaScript at lower rates than the rest of the community.
Until this year, the popularity of Kubernetes had been growing rapidly. Based on our survey data, it was used by 16% of developers in 2018, 29% in 2019, and reached a staggering 40% in 2020. In 2021, however, the popularity of Kubernetes stopped increasing.
90% of developers who use Kubernetes have SSD discs, and they also typically have above average amounts of RAM on their computers.
This question was shown to respondents who responded with one of the following answers to the question "How do you use containers?": "I run my application in one container and use backing services (e.g. database)" or "I run multiple application containers (e.g. microservices)".
It seems there are some regional preferences: Developers in China and India prefer Docker run, while Docker Compose is a little more popular in the US, Japan, and Europe.
PHP developers prefer to use Docker Compose, while Python developers prefer Docker run over other containerized applications. None of the other languages had large differences with respect to their users’ preferences for containerized applications.
Hosting
Amazon Web Services is the leader in cloud solutions, and its popularity continues to grow.
Amazon Web Services is clearly used widely by DevOps engineers, as more than 70% work with it. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Platform and Heroku are slightly more popular among developers who are not involved in DevOps.
DevOps specialists are also more likely than developers in general to use several cloud services.
The median application being developed today consists of 3–5 components. Additionally, 3–5 backing services are typically used.
Cloud services
36% of respondents use cloud services in their development workflow. Cloud services are most commonly used for working with data stored in the cloud and for the reproduction of the application environment for local development.
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