The Node.js Foundation has released the results of their 2017 User Survey, showing a growing interest from the enterprise.
The online survey was taken by over 1,400 developers and managers from November 30, 2016 to January 16, 2017 and was intended to "profile Node.js users" and "identify potential areas of improvement".
Enterprise developers, who value stability and may not be able to upgrade with every release, have helped make the Long Term Support (LTS) versions of Node.js the most popular:
- 39% of respondents with the developer title are using Node.js for enterprise.
- 59% of respondents with a manager title are using Node.js for enterprise.
- 69% of enterprise users plan to increase their use of Node.js over the next 12 months.
- 47% of enterprise users have been using Node.js for 3+ years and 58% of developers using Node.js have 10+ years in total development experience.
Compared with the 2016 survey, where 45% of respondents were using the available LTS version, the overall usage this year is 78% for both version 4 and 6, the current LTS versions. James Snell, Technical Steering Committee Director of the Node.js Foundation, told InfoQ that this shows their strategy is working:
We've increasingly seen more Node.js users turning to our LTS versions (Node.js 4 and 6) because their priorities with Node.js are stability and security. When we set out creating the long-term support plan, we wanted to ensure that developers were able to choose between security and stability or new features, which is what odd number releases imply with Node.js. This statistic is ... more validation that the LTS strategy has enticed more enterprises to turn to Node.js for development.
The survey showed that Node is used in many ways, from databases to front-ends to containers. 75% of respondents say they use primarily for back-end work or full stack work. In the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates as the primary deployment target, used more than Heroku, Google Cloud, and Azure combined.
The full Node.js Foundation 2017 User Survey Resuls also show that the more developers use Node, the more productivity and satisfaction increase. In addition, most developers said that learning Node was easy, regardless of region or size of company.
