Duncan Davidson
Thursday, March 28, 2019

Survey says!

I posted a quick survey to Twitter yesterday, asking:

If you were starting a startup right now and were picking a place to host your first service bits, where would you be tempted to deploy first?

There were 1493 votes cast, and the results were:

The shape of the results for the big three clouds doesn’t surprise me much. This wasn’t rigorous by any stretch of the imagination, and there’s definitely some bias in the numbers based on who saw and retweeted the tweet. That bias almost certainly favors Azure somewhat, and for full disclosure, I currently work at Microsoft. But still, no big suprises here.

Answering which of the major clouds people wanted to use, however, wasn’t really my goal. Here’s the way I should have phrased the question:

If you were booting up a startup and could only pick one of the following to deploy to, which one would you be tempted to use?

The key word in this question (and the one I tweeted as well) is tempted. The company names are proxies. What I really wanted to see was if the developer experience and deployment styles enabled by serverless, JAMstack, and similar approaches that manage infrastructure for you was getting traction in my circles.

And yes dear reader, given that this was my motive, I should have grouped Firebase with Netlify and Zeit and not with Google Cloud. And I probably should have included Iron and Amplify in that grouping as well. Even with those caveats, however, I find it pretty amazing that 22% clicked on the “Netlify, Zeit, or similar” entry. Not only is that a good reflection on those companies, but it’s also a pretty good signal for the developer experience and technology approach those companies are championing.

Thanks to everyone that participated and retweeted this survey. And thanks to those that wrote in their own answers. There was a lot to think about in the discussion.