AWS is one of the biggest cloud computing hosts on that planet. With AWS you can host just about anything for your business, such as Single Page Apps (SPAs), containers, websites, web apps, and IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions that cover myriad use cases. AWS not only has all of the tools you need to make this possible, but with plenty of additional tools for automation, you can even evolve your software lifecycle into an agile platform, with continuous development and delivery.
There are always a number of moving parts with cloud-native development
According to Grand View Research, the cloud computing industry was worth $365 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a rate of nearly 16% from 2022 to 2030. That’s an undeniably huge increase. It also means the cloud is already an essential component of businesses and will only become more important in the coming years. It has also become a pivotal technology for consumers, startups, sole proprietors, and students.
If your business relies on the cloud, chances are good that at some point you will work with AWS. Given that the service offers many products for functions like computing, storage, databases, networking, content delivery, analytics, machine learning, security, identity, and compliance, your company might well adopt AWS as a complete platform.
When this becomes a reality, you’ll need to know the right programming language to choose for your development projects. If you choose the right programming language for AWS, the project will go smoothly. The wrong language, however, can cause no end of problems. The wrong language selection could lead to your team having to scrap all the work they’ve done and start over. That will not only lead to missed deadlines but budgetary issues as well.
You don’t want that.
Instead, in the planning stages of the project, you want to make sure to take the time to select the right programming language that is best suited to your cloud-native development project.
But which language or languages are the right ones for your project, and how do you choose? Let’s take a look.
Choosing the Right Programming Language for Your AWS Project
Choosing the best programming language for a project is just as important as choosing the best programming language for the right cloud host — maybe even more so. One nice thing about AWS is that it is developer-centric and includes a long list of software development kits for numerous programming languages, such as .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Node.js.
But you certainly cannot just look through a menu of languages AWS supports and choose from there. It’s much more complicated than that because some languages are simply not suitable for a certain project. You need to know things like what the language is capable of, how well a language is supported, whether your development team is familiar with a language — or how easy the language is to learn and adopt — and what tools and frameworks can be used. These are important aspects of every language.
Think about it this way. You have an object to cut and your choice of tools includes a scalpel, a carving knife, a butter knife, a machete, and an axe. If you’re performing a surgery, the choice is obvious: a scalpel. If you’re cutting a slice of cheese, the choice isn’t quite as simple — you could go with the butter knife, but the carving knife would be better. If you’re cutting a branch from a tree, the machete would work, but an axe might do the job more efficiently. It’s not only about what tool can do the job but what tool can do the job more effectively and efficiently, all the while keeping costs down.
There are questions you should also ask before making the selection. Some of those questions include:
- Does the project need to scale?
- Will the project be a mobile app, a web app, or a hybrid app?
- Is data integrity or performance more important?
- Will Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning be required?
- Will the application rely on large amounts of data?
- How much time does the project have?
- What’s the budget for the project?
- Do you have a development team capable of handling a new language?
- Is security crucial?
Before you even get to those questions, however, you should consider four things out of the gate: the language’s ecosystem, its community, its maintainability, and your development team.
Let’s talk about each.
Language Ecosystem
A software ecosystem is a collection of packages that depend on one another and evolve together. The ecosystem doesn’t just include the software packages but also all of the stakeholders involved in making those packages work together. An example of an ecosystem would be JavaScript, which works in conjunction with Node.js, NPM, V8, Spidermonkey, Chakra, JavaScript Core, Babel, Gulp, Grunt, Browserify, Rollup, React, Vue, and Angular. Those software packages come together to create this robust ecosystem.
Think about it this way: If you look at a language and find there are very few peripheral tools available, that could very easily translate to the language not being flexible enough to meet your needs. And a language without sufficient frameworks could also mean more work on the part of your development team. More work equals more of your budget spent on the project.
Community
The community for a programming language is all the people who use, improve, develop, support, teach, promote, work with, and talk about a particular language. Some newer languages generally have a much smaller community, whereas languages like Java and JavaScript have massive languages. Consider this: You’re about to embark on one of the most important projects in the history of your company. Do you want to trust that project to a language with a small community or a large one?
A language with a small community could mean you might not be able to find help should the need arise. On the other hand, a language with a vast community tends to have plenty of support options and help available. If you are certain your team could use such help, you’ll want to stick with a language that has a large community. The larger the community, the larger the ecosystem. You see how that works.
Maintainability
This might not cross your mind, but it’s very important. Imagine you’ve chosen what you think is the perfect language for the project. Your team builds the software and your customers absolutely love it. The intent is to keep the project going by releasing new iterations with added features and plenty of improvements.
And then, out of nowhere, the team that developed and maintains the language calls it quits. All of a sudden, you’re left with a project that relied on a language that is now dead in the water.
This happens. Because of it, you need to consider how future-proof a language is before choosing it. Languages like Java, JavaScript, Python, and C++ are pretty safe bets — they will persist for a very long time. This is one area you do not want to bet on. If a language seems like it isn’t well maintained, you should think twice about even considering it as an option.
Your Development Team
This is an important factor to take into consideration. If you have a team filled with rock-star JavaScript developers, the choice is obvious. That is unless JavaScript can’t meet the needs of your project. Or, maybe JavaScript is the perfect solution for your project and you don’t have enough rock-star developers who know the language. If you’re lucky, the development team you have on hand will be perfectly capable of working with the perfect language for your project.
When you consider those three elements, you are already ahead of the game and the decision will start to become clear.
Top 5 Programming Languages for AWS Cloud Computing
When we think of the best programming languages for AWS cloud computing, we really need to look no further than the top 5 languages that are used on the platform. That metric alone tells us any one of these 5 languages could be a solid choice for your project, so long as the language you choose can serve the project.
For example, you most certainly wouldn’t choose Python to create a modern front-end for a web app. Nor would you select JavaScript to work with big data. Every language has its limitations, so you’ll need to know the needs of your project as well as what purpose the project will serve.
If you know you’re creating a Single Page Application that will be viewed on mobile devices, you need to select a language suited to that purpose. If you’re creating a web application that will work with large amounts of data and Artificial Intelligence, the language you choose must be able to fulfill those criteria.
More goes into this choice than you probably considered. But if you take a look at the top 5 programming languages for AWS, you’ll see that they each serve a specific purpose. And, in the end, you might find you have to work with more than one of these languages to complete the project. Because all of these languages have considerable communities around them, chances are pretty good you’ll find everything you need to get them to work in conjunction to bring that project to life.
With that said, let’s take a look at the top 5 programming languages for AWS.
#1 Python
Python is an interpreted language, meaning it isn’t compiled. Each line of code is executed, one at a time, using the Python interpreter. Python’s most popular use cases include things like website and software development, task automation, data analysis, AI/ML, and data visualization. If your project has anything to do with big data or Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, you will probably need to make use of Python.
Another big plus for Python is that it’s one of the easiest languages to learn. And because it has a massive library of reusable code snippets, it makes creating your project even easier.
Python has also been widely adopted by scientific communities for its ability to work with large sets of scientific libraries.
The one thing to keep in mind with Python is that due to limitations of the Global Interpreter Lock, it doesn’t scale across multiple cores on a single machine as well as some other languages.
#2 Java
Java has been around long enough to have evolved into a very important language for many different use cases. And while you might think Java isn’t a good fit for cloud-native development, the language has been adapted and adopted for all sorts of development projects.
One of the biggest benefits of Java is its massive community. On top of that, Java has a very robust ecosystem, as well as more documentation than you will ever need, plenty of libraries and frameworks, extensive security, and a global pool of developers.
Java is great for e-commerce and is the primary language for Android development. So, if your cloud-native projects involve mobile devices, Java should be a top consideration.
#3 JavaScript
If your project will require dynamic and interactive web content to be served up via applications or web browsers, you’re going to need JavaScript development services. JavaScript’s superpower is the ability to add complex features to web pages. Things like interactive/animated menus, displaying timely content updates, interactive maps, animated graphics, and scrolling video jukeboxes can all be made with JavaScript.
And seeing as how JavaScript is one of the popular languages on the market, you can bet it has a massive community and a bright future, and many of your developers will already understand how to use it.
Of course, the one thing to know about JavaScript is that your developers will need to have a solid understanding of HTML and CSS as well.
#4 C++
C++ is one of the most popular object-oriented languages on the planet. It’s used to develop things like operating systems, GUIs, IoT devices, game development, databases, web browsers, machine learning tools, AR/VR, scientific research, and financial tools.
The fact that C++ is used to develop IoT devices should clue you in that it’s a very solid option for your cloud-native needs. Those IoT devices will have to communicate with your cloud to deliver loads of data for processing.
With C++ and AWS, you can do things like creating Android applications that interact with the cloud and cross-platform text-to-speech with the help of Amazon Polly. You can even store sensitive information on AWS, thanks to the Amazon S3 encryption client for C++ developers.
C++ is a very useful language. That it can work with AWS is a major bonus for any company looking to develop and deploy to the AWS infrastructure.
#5 PHP
AWS works well with PHP. Case in point, AWS provides an SDK, a Laravel SDK plugin, IDE toolkits, and PHP support in Cloud9 IDE. With PHP you can develop containerized applications and serverless apps and work seamlessly with AI/ML.
The combination of PHP and AWS makes it possible to build and deploy high-availability web applications that can also be monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. There are plenty of APIs to use with PHP and all the documentation you could imagine.
PHP is a very robust language and has a very large community, which ensures it will not only enjoy a continually growing feature set but that it also has a secure future ahead of it.
PHP is a great language for e-commerce, project management tools, content management systems, GUIs, online communities, Facebook applications, parsing XML files, mailing lists, image processing/generating, data analysis, dynamic website templates, and WordPress plugins. When your developers put their minds to it, there’s little they can’t create with PHP, AWS, and the vast amount of tools available to the language.
Conclusion
This will be one of the most important decisions you make for your project. Choose wisely and things will go smoothly and on time. Choose poorly and your teams will be scrambling to complete the task at hand on time.
And don’t forget, in the end, you’ll probably wind up having to select more than one language to complete the entire project. You’ll want to make sure the languages you choose work well together and have plenty of support for those times when a problem arises with no solution in sight.
