State of the Front-end 2024: Reflection 2
Developer Experience and iteration speeds are being prioritised over cost efficiencies
The Software House have just published their State of Front-end 2024 survey. These are my reflections.
Platforms that bring a simplified, more delightful developer experience are becoming the preferred way of hosting web applications. 36.2% of developers would choose Vercel as their go-to platform, 20.7% lean toward Netlify, and even Cloudflare Pages (a relative newcomer) captured 10.2%.
While AWS (32%), Azure (10.4%), GCP (9%), and running your own server (24.3%) aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, it feels like the tide is slowly starting to shift.
What's your preferred method of hosting applications?
source: tsh.io/state-of-frontend
In the startup sector especially, my assumption is that the developer experience and shortened iteration cycles enabled by platforms like Netlify or Vercel outweigh their higher infrastructure costs (bandwidth, storage, etc.). Sure, the cost of running a PostgreSQL database may be cheaper on your own server, but managing provisioning, maintenance, and scaling requires significant, dedicated resources – resources that could be better used elsewhere.
So, I can’t help but wonder: at what point do the scales start to tip even more towards these new platforms? Or should we expect big infrastructure providers like AWS to improve theirs any time soon? Is that what Amplify is suppose to be?
After all, platforms like Vercel and Netlify are built on their shoulders, yet they’re effectively abstracting away the complexity – and, perhaps, the loyalty. Is it in the interest of the big players to improve developer experience directly on their own platforms, or will they simply double down on being the invisible backbone of the web?
