Open source developers moving to the cloud

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InternetNews.com has learned that a new survey set for official release on January 20th will report that 40 percent of open source project developers are planning on cloud deployments for their projects.

The data comes from a survey of 360 developers conducted in November 2008 by Evans Data. The biggest winner in terms of what cloud service developers plan to use is Google’s App Engine at 28 percent of respondents. Amazon  came in second at 15 percent.

 Not surprisingly developers 52 percent of developer claimed to be using a virutalized Linux environment and over half are using the MySQL database.

It all seem fairly obvious to me.

Apps Engine is free so it makes for an easy choice to get started with the cloud, though Google does not use MySQL for its database back end – instead App Engine uses Big Tables (which frankly I still don’t quite understand how to use as well as MySQL). The cloud after all is really what? A fancy new term for distributed hosting? It makes sense to want to offer apps as a service and it makes sense to want to do it cheaply on massively scalable platforms like Google and Amazon.