Eclipse Foundation Releases 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Results

BRUSSELS, Belgium – The Eclipse Foundation, home to the world's largest open source community focused on the Internet of Things, today announced results from its 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Survey. Administered by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group, and the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group, the survey provides essential insights into IoT and edge computing industry landscapes, the challenges developers are facing, and the opportunities for enterprise stakeholders in the IoT & edge open source ecosystem. Now in its eighth year, the survey is the IoT & edge industry’s leading technical survey. 

“IoT and edge computing are arguably the most important technologies today, particularly for industries like industrial automation, agriculture, and automotive,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The insights detailed in this survey report can help guide internal developer teams and technology decision-makers as they seek to bring the Industrial IoT to life.”

The online survey was conducted from April 1, 2022, to June 15, 2022, during which 910 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers from a broad set of industries and organizations participated. Key findings include:

• Java, C, and C++ are the most widely used programming languages for constrained devices. Developers indicate that Java is the preferred language for IoT gateways and edge nodes.

• MQTT continues to be the most widely used IIoT communication protocol, though there seems to be increased fragmentation. HTTP/HTTPS and REST show slight decreases in IIoT usage compared to 2021, while alternative communication protocols (TCP/IP, AMQP, in-house/proprietary) have seen noticeable growth. 

• Agriculture (23 percent) has emerged as the leading industry for IIoT and edge computing technology, followed by industrial automation (22 percent), automotive (20 percent), and energy & smart cities (17 percent).

• Concerns around security have nearly doubled in this year’s survey, making it one of the top 3 challenges developers face, along with connectivity, and data collection & analytics.

• Edge computing is gaining traction in real world applications as top edge computing workloads all show significant increases in adoption.

• There is increased public cloud fragmentation, and the big three are being challenged. Despite continued dominance, Amazon AWS with 36 percent usage (-8 percent in 2022), Microsoft Azure with 18 percent (-11 percent in 2022), and Google Cloud Platform with 16 percent (-4 percent in 2022) have all lost ground against a growing competitive landscape.

• Container images (49 percent) are the most frequently selected edge computing artifact.

The survey data also contains details about edge computing workloads,  developer concerns, and breakdowns by market. The entire report and its ground-breaking insights can be downloaded here. 

Eclipse IoT’s knowledge and expertise span 10+ years of experience in edge computing and the IoT. Eclipse IoT is home to open source innovation that has delivered some of the industry’s most popular IoT protocols. CoAP (Eclipse Californium), DDS (Eclipse Cyclone DDS), LwM2M (Eclipse Leshan), MQTT (Eclipse Paho, Eclipse Mosquitto, and Eclipse Amlen), and OPC UA (Eclipse Milo) are all built around Eclipse IoT projects. The Eclipse IoT toolkit also contains an innovative homegrown protocol built from the ground up for edge computing: Eclipse zenoh. In addition to other popular Eclipse IoT production-ready platforms that cover various use cases such as digital twins (Eclipse Ditto), contactless payments (Eclipse Keyple), industrial applications (Eclipse Kura), in addition to Eclipse Kapua  — a modular IoT cloud platform that manages data and devices, Eclipse Kanto and much more.

To learn more about how to get involved with Eclipse IoT, Edge Native, Sparkplug, or other working groups at the Eclipse Foundation, visit the Foundation’s membership page. Working group members benefit from a broad range of services, including exclusive access to detailed industry research findings, marketing assistance, and expert open source governance.

For further IoT & edge related information, please reach us at:

[email protected]

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Quotes From IoT & Edge Native Working Group Members

Eurotech

“This year’s survey edition, conducted under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation, again provides fascinating information and valuable insights,”said Robert Andres, Chief Strategy Officer.IoT & Edge Developer survey helps us and other organizations understand the dynamics and trends that drive our customers and partners. We highly appreciate the execution of the survey as well as the relevance, way beyond a thriving commercially-friendly open source ecosystem we are proudly part of.

Edgeworx

“Every year we learn something new from this data, and frequently the trend of the data over time is surprising new information,'' said Kilton Hopkins, Chief Technology Officer of Edgeworx. “It is vital to understand what technologies are currently being used and even more important to see what technologies are becoming more in demand. We use those insights to participate in ongoing Edge Native Working Group community discussions more effectively.”

Red Hat

“It’s increasingly critical for enterprises to understand the impact of IoT and edge landscapes and how they innovate and modernize. This is true across all major industries, especially telecommunications, automotive and manufacturing,” said Francis Chow, vice president and general manager, In-Vehicle Operating Systems and Edge. “IoT and edge computing are at the core of Red Hat’s strategy, and we are collaborating with industry leaders to increase innovation for them through open source. The Eclipse Foundation’s 2022 IoT and Edge Developer Survey provides essential insights to help decision-makers integrate IoT and edge technologies into their own strategies and roadmaps.”

Zettascale

The 2022 survey showed increased fragmentation in several areas, including communication protocol. This is a consequence of the rise of Edge Computing and the increased need for scalable, efficient and performant Cloud-to-microcontroller communication. said Angelo Corsaro, CEO & CTO.This is an area where the Eclipse foundation is strategically positioned, with projects like Eclipse Zenoh, to provide a unifying and end-to-end solution.

About the Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and over 400 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, distributed ledger technologies, open processor designs, and many others. The Eclipse Foundation is an international non-profit association supported by over 330 members, including industry leaders who value open source as a key enabler for their business strategies. To learn more, follow us on Twitter @EclipseFdn, LinkedIn, or visit eclipse.org.