NGINX, Inc., the engine delivering sites and applications for the modern web, today announced the results of its first annual Future of Application Development and Delivery Survey. Based on the insight of more than 1,800 IT professionals, the survey found that developers are in command when it comes to choosing technology at their organizations, and containers and microservices are starting to move from theory to practice in the majority of respondents’ organizations.

NGINX is the heart of the modern web. The NGINX community includes some of the most forward-thinking minds in the application development and deployment world. More than half of the world’s busiest sites and applications run on NGINX, and the company was able to use its unique position in the marketplace to conduct a study of its community to better understand the thoughts and perceptions of modern technology professionals.

“To meet the demands of consumers and achieve business priorities, the modern web is powered by a new suite of technologies,” said NGINX CEO Gus Robertson. “These tools are overwhelmingly open source, cloud-native, and place a premium on adaptability, performance, and scale. Of all these new tools, none is more ubiquitous than NGINX, which helps businesses deliver their apps with performance, reliability, security, and scale.”

Containers and Microservices Are Finally Entering the Mainstream
With a growing number of open source options, developers are taking charge and are gaining more decision-making power in the organization, with 74 percent of respondents saying developers are responsible for choosing the organization’s application development and delivery tools. More and more often, these decisions include moving to containers and microservices.

Today, nearly 2/3 of organizations are either investigating containers or are using them in development or production. One in five of those surveyed are already using containers in production, with 1/3 of those running more than 80 percent of those workloads on containers. Perhaps more tellingly, half of those running containers are using them for mission-critical applications, meaning organizations are putting their full trust in container technology more than commonly thought.

Microservices also continue to increase in popularity. Nearly 70 percent of organizations are either using or investigating the use of microservices, with approximately 1/3 of organizations currently using them in production.

The Cloud Continues to Impress; AWS Remains Dominant
The cloud — public and private — is one of the most impressive new technologies to emerge in recent years. Public cloud usage remains much more common than that of private clouds. When asked which private cloud their organizations use, 49 percent of respondents said they don’t use private cloud. By comparison, when asked which public cloud they use, only 14 percent said they don’t use public cloud.

When asked what they believe is the best cloud service, half of respondents said Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is more than Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace combined. The popularity of AWS was even more pronounced for medium and large companies, where 3/4 of respondents said AWS was the best cloud service. AWS is also the most common in terms of implementation, with 41 percent of organizations who are using public cloud using AWS.

App Performance & Security Are Still Critical, Yet Organizations Struggling to Improve
Security, uptime, and performance ranked as more critical to organizations than innovation and adding new features. However, most engineering organizations design their processes first and foremost around new feature development.

According to the survey, application performance is an issue for an overwhelming 75 percent of organizations, with 25 percent claiming their application is outright slow. Organizations clearly see the gap, but many don’t dedicate time and resources to address the issue. In fact, 31 percent said their organizations address performance infrequently or not at all.

The most popular technique for improving security and protecting against data breaches is to install a web application firewall (WAF). Overall, 57% of organizations use a WAF. Among smaller companies, WAF usage was even higher, up to 69 percent. Infrastructure anti-DDoS (at Layers 2 and 3) is gaining popularity in small and medium sized organizations, as well, whereas a higher percentage of large companies are using anti-virus.

For additional survey results and to learn more about the methodology, please visit: https://www.nginx.com/app-dev-survey/

To explore these topics in more detail, join NGINX for its third annual user conference, nginx.conf, September 6-8, 2016 in Austin, TX. For more information about the event, or to register, please visit: https://www.nginx.com/nginxconf/