As you work to develop and manage complex data-intensive applications to meet the ever-changing needs of your customers, you need a way to bring those applications and workloads closer to them, regardless of their location.
Increasingly, global developers are looking to distributed cloud computing as the way to ensure an optimal customer experience, according to a new study from developer-focused research firm SlashData.
The study, Developer perceptions of the distributed cloud, commissioned by Akamai, surveyed more than 700 professional cloud developers in more than 50 countries and across 15 industries. The survey defined distributed cloud computing as the practice of decentralizing cloud resources and services to be physically closer to the data source or user, while still being managed centrally.
In the study, 55% of developers were actively working with distributed cloud computing services. An additional 28% were somewhat familiar, with a basic understanding of distributed cloud services. while 10% were not very familiar but were interested in learning. and 7% were not at all familiar and had no interest in learning. There were also regional differences, with 61% of North American developers already use a distributed cloud compared to 51% of their counterparts in Western Europe.
5 Benefits and Top Use Cases
The five most attractive benefits about distributed cloud solutions were:
- Improved user experience due to reduced latency (38%)
- Flexibility to scale to different geographies (34%)
- Greater ability to handle data-intensive applications (33%)
- Economic performance due to local resources (33%)
- Increased durability due to geographic distribution (30%)
Interestingly, the benefit ranked lowest by developers (23%) was the ability to innovate with local computing power. To the report’s authors, this finding suggests that developers have yet to fully explore the potential uses of distributed clouds in real-world applications. Developers likely still took a traditional centralized approach rather than taking an imaginative leap to consider all the ways they could use the hyperlocal computing capabilities of a distributed cloud system.
When asked which areas of development they thought were most likely to benefit from distributed clouds, developers cited these best use cases:
- Big data and analytics (48%)
- Real-time applications such as games, financial transactions (42%)
- AI and machine learning workload (39%)
- Remote workforce support (38%)
- Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity (35%)
While developers as a whole are ranked distributed ledgers/blockchain applications (25%) lower as best use case, there were significant variations by industry, notably energy (39%), gaming (35%) and telecommunications and networks (35%). Organizations in these industries have been excited about how blockchain can positively disrupt their current markets.
Barriers to distribution: Potential cost, risk and complexity
So what factors have prevented some developers from adopting distributed cloud solutions? According to respondents, the biggest challenges or disadvantages were:
- High implementation and maintenance costs (36%)
- Potential security risks due to distribution (35%)
- Complexity of managing distributed systems (35%)
If they are able to influence the future direction of the distributed cloud, developers would choose to accelerate the adoption of the technology by prioritizing advances or improvements in providing:
- Clear cost savings and cost-effectiveness (30%)
- Stronger security measures (27%)
- Improved tools for managing distributed systems (26%)
Developers were also eager to see more standards in place before moving services to a distributed cloud. Specifically, they sought to implement more data security and privacy standards (39%), open cloud standards (26%), and data portability standards (25%).
Discover more information
Read the full report for more information, including deep dives that compare and contrast different industry reactions. For IT leaders who want to learn more about the distributed cloud, they can download a new report, Distributed Cloud: Technology’s Next Act.
