DevOps and Python have developed a mutually beneficial relationship.
In a recent survey released by the Python Software Foundation and software development company JetBrains, researchers found that more and more developers are using the program language for an array of versatile projects, including DevOps and machine learning.
In fact, Python developers told the researchers that DevOps is increasingly part of their professional development work.
“In 2018 we had significantly more respondents specifying they’re involved in DevOps (an increase of 8 percent compared to 2017). In terms of Python users using Python as their secondary language, DevOps has overtaken web development,” according to the “2018 Python Developers study,” which is based on responses from 18,000 developers in 150 countries.
Over the last two years, Python has grown more important to developers thanks to its flexibility, especially when it comes to web development. It’s no surprise that as other projects have gained popularity in the enterprise—DevOps and machine learning—developers have started adopting the language to other disciplines, especially as businesses invest more in application development.
In TIOBE’s February 2019 index, Python now ranks third behind favorites such as Java and C, edging out C++ for its current position.
Digging into the numbers, the survey finds that 43 percent of developers are using Python for DevOps projects, as well as system administration and writing automation scripts. That’s an increase from the 35 percent who reported the same types of uses for the programming language in 2017.
The report notes that these numbers reflect a combination of Python used as either the primary or secondary language for various projects. As the report notes: “DevOps/system administration/writing automation scripts has moved into first place among Python users using it as a secondary language.”
Machine learning is another up-and-coming category, with 38 percent of developers using Python for these projects compared to 31 percent last year.
Overall, data analysis remains the No. 1 use case for Python developers, with 58 percent reporting that it’s their main focus when it comes to development.
In second place is web development, according to the report.
In terms of the top cloud platforms for Python developers, Amazon Web Service is the top choice, with 36 percent of respondents reporting that they use AWS. From there, it’s Google Cloud Platform (29 percent) Heroku (26 percent), DigitalOcean (23 percent) and Microsoft Azure (16 percent).
About a third of those surveyed responded that they don’t use any cloud platforms.
When asked about running code in a cloud production environment, 47 percent responded that they use virtual machines, although 40 percent of Python developers reported that they prefer containers. Another 28 percent use platform as a service (PaaS) and 21 percent are taking the leap to serverless computing.
Additionally, when developing for the cloud, about 35 percent of those in the survey report that they use Docker containers.
This increase use of Python within DevOps, as well as other connected areas such as serverless computing, does not surprise Anshu Agarwal, the CEO and co-founder of Nimbella, a cloud-agnostic, serverless cloud platform for developers. She noted the language’s use within a wide range of projects, specifically machine learning and AI, are driving this change.
“Python developers are driving serverless requirements in new and unique ways, primarily because of the interest in data analysis, ML and AI,” Agarwal wrote in an email. “These data analysis and ML/AI-centric serverless use cases are different than request/response style serverless functions which run for much shorter durations. Python functions in serverless may have much longer durations (10s of minutes or hours), and consume a lot more memory. For such functions a different kind of serverless framework needs to be adopted that can handle long running workloads.”
When it comes to continuous integration systems, about a third of respondents don’t use any. However, when they do, Jenkins is the most popular at 25 percent, followed by Gitlab CI and Travis CI, with 18 percent each. For configuration management, 20 percent reported using Ansible, while 9 percent used custom tools. Puppet, Salt and Chef also appeared in the list.
Finally, about two-thirds of Python developers (69 percent) use Linux as their main operating system of choice for development. Microsoft Windows comes in a distant second at 47 percent and Apple’s macOS in third at 32 percent, according to the study.
