AWS is preferred by Python programmers according to a survey of Python developers. While they don’t use a cloud platform all the time, most respondents prefer Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) when they do. The 2018 Python Developers Survey surveyed more than 20,000 developers in more than 150 countries. This revealed that 55 percent of Python users prefer AWS to cloud platforms. The second place is Google Cloud Platform, followed by DigitalOcean and Microsoft Azure. A third of respondents don’t use any cloud services. [Click on the image to see a larger view.] Top Cloud Platforms (source : Python Software Foundation). “In addition to the popular cloud platforms mentioned above, we identified OpenStack and Linode getting 6 percent each, OpenShift 3%, and Rackspace 2%,” the report continued. The report also contains other cloud-related insights:

• 47 percent of respondents said that when running code in cloud production environments, they do it in: virtual machines (47 percent); containers (40 percent); on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) (28 percent); serverless (21 percent); other (2 percent); none (13 percent).
• These are the top five answers to “How can you develop for cloud computing?” These include: locally with virtualenv (56%); in Docker containers (35%); in virtual machines (24%); with local system interpreter (17%); and in remote development environments (17%).

AWS is a great place to return the Python love. AWS has a whole section in its developer center dedicated to Python (Boto 3), and guidance such as Getting Started With the AWS SDK For Python (Boto 3). There are also projects such as Deploy Python Web App. The survey results this week also included some non-cloud takeaways:

• The Python 3 adoption rate is rapidly increasing and is currently at 84 percent. Only 16 percent of Python 2 users use Python 2 as their main interpreter. This is a significant increase in popularity for Python 3 from 75 percent in 2017.
• Data analysis is more popular than Web development among Python users. Its popularity has risen from 50 percent to 58 percent in 2017 and 2018.
• Half of developers who use Python as their main language also employ JavaScript. Python is often used in conjunction with HTML/CSS and Bash/Shell as well as SQL, C/C++ and Java.
• Web developers love Flask and Django. They have equal shares (around 45%) and leave behind other Python Web frameworks.
• The most popular data science libraries and frameworks are NumPy and Pandas. Machine learning-specific libraries like SciKit-Learn and TensorFlow, Keras and others are also very popular.
• Significantly more respondents reported participating in DevOps in 2018, an increase of 8 percentage points over 2017
• PyCharm, with its two editions, is the most used tool for Python development. VS Code’s popularity has increased from 7 percent to 16 percent in 2017 and 2018 making it the second-most popular editor for Python development. Other popular editors for Python are Sublime, Vim and Jupyter Notebook.
• Surprisingly almost two-thirds (63%) of Python developers choose Linux for their development environment OS.

This blog post contains more information about the survey.