A new survey has revealed the operating systems, communications protocols, cloud platforms and other tools used the most by 1,700 Internet of Things (IoT) developers.

The survey was carried out by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, a not-for-profit open source software organisation, in conjunction with its members – including Bosch Software Innovations and Red Hat.

About three quarters of survey respondents used Linux for edge and gateway IoT devices, while about half used Windows. Debian and its derivatives Raspbian, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core  were the most-used Linux distributions.

Windows was the most-used non-Linux operating system, though freeRTOS was close behind – it was the top operating system for constrained devices.

More than half of constrained devices use ARM CPUs – specifically, ARM Cortex-M0/ARM, Cortex-M3/ARM and Cortex-M7 chips.

And 70 percent of respondents used ARM CPUs for IoT gateways, while 42 percent used Intel x86 and x86_64 chips.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was most-used cloud platform, with 34 percent of respondents using it for IoT. However Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform were close behind, with 23 percent and 20 percent usage respectively.

The survey also found that:

  • IoT developers were most focussed on IoT platforms, home automation and industrial automation, with 26-34 percent of respondents working on each of these areas
  • IoT developers’ top concern was security, followed by connectivity. Other key concerns included data collection and analytics, performance, privacy, hardware integration, standards and return on investment
  • The most-used security technologies were communication security, data encryption and JSON Web Token (or their equivalent)
  • The most-used programming language for constrained IoT devices was C, while Java was the most-used for IoT gateways, edge nodes and cloud
  • Nearly half of IoT developers used HTTP, while 42 percent used MQTT and 26 percent used Websockets
  • TCP/IP was used by 54 percent of respondents, WiFi by 48 percent and Ethernet by 42 percent
  • More than three quarters of respondents were actively involved in IoT development.