What are the best programming languages ​​for AWS?

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There are always a number of moving parts in 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% between 2022 and 2030. That's an undeniably huge increase. It also means that the cloud is already an essential component of businesses and will only become more important in the coming years. It has also become a foundational technology for consumers, startups, sole proprietors and students.

If your business depends on the cloud, chances are good that at some point you will work with AWS. Given that the service offers many products for functions such as compute, storage, databases, networking, content delivery, analytics, machine learning, security, identity and compliance, your company may well adopt AWS as a complete platform.

When this becomes a reality, you will 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 endless problems. The wrong language selection can result in your team having to discard all the work they've done and start over. This will not only lead to missed deadlines but also budgetary issues.

You don't want that.

Instead, in the project planning stages, you should take the time to select the right programming language that best suits your cloud native development project.

But which language or languages ​​are best suited 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 — perhaps even more so. One interesting thing about AWS is that it is developer-centric and includes a long list of software development kits for various programming languages ​​such as .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Node.js.

But you certainly can't just look at a menu of languages ​​supported by AWS and choose from there. It's much more complicated than that because some languages ​​are simply not suitable for a given project. You need to know things like what the language is capable of, how well it is supported, whether your development team is familiar with a language — or how easy it is to learn and adopt the language — and what tools and frameworks can be used. These are important aspects of each language.

Think of 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 are performing surgery, the choice is obvious: a scalpel. If you are cutting a slice of cheese, the choice is not so simple – you could choose the butter knife, but the carving knife would be better. If you are cutting a branch off a tree, a machete would work, but an ax could do the job more efficiently. It's not just about which tool can do the job, but which tool can do the job most effectively and efficiently while keeping costs down.

There are questions you should also ask before making the selection. Some of these questions include:

• Does the project need to be scaled?
• Will the project be a mobile, web or hybrid application?
• Is data integrity or performance more important?
• Will artificial intelligence or machine learning be needed?
• Will the application rely on large amounts of data?
• How long is the project?
• What is the project budget?
• Do you have a development team capable of handling a new language?
• Is security crucial?

Before you even get to these questions, however, you should consider four things from the start: the language's ecosystem, its community, its maintainability, and its development team.

Let's talk about each one.

Language ecosystem

A software ecosystem is a collection of packages that depend on each other and evolve together. The ecosystem not only includes the software packages, but also all the stakeholders involved in making these packages work together. An example of an ecosystem would be JavaScript, which works together with Node.js, NPM, V8, Spidermonkey, Chakra, JavaScript Core, Babel, Gulp, Grunt, Browserify, Rollup, React, Vue and Angular. These software packages come together to create this robust ecosystem.

Think of it this way: if you look at a language and find that there are very few peripheral tools available, that could easily translate into language that isn't flexible enough to meet your needs. And a language without enough frameworks can 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 of a programming language is all the people who use, improve, develop, support, teach, promote, work and talk about a specific language. Some newer languages ​​generally have a much smaller community, while languages ​​like Java and JavaScript have massive languages. Consider this: You are about to embark on one of the most important projects in your company's history. Do you want to trust this project to a language with a small or large community?

A language with a small community may mean you won't be able to find help if you need it. On the other hand, a language with a large community tends to have many support options and help available. If you're sure your team needs this help, you'll want to use a language that has a large community. The larger the community, the larger the ecosystem. You see how this works.

Maintainability

This may not cross your mind, but it is very important. Imagine that you have chosen what you consider to be the perfect language for the project. Your team builds the software and your customers love it. The intention is to continue the project by launching new iterations with additional features and many improvements.

And then, out of nowhere, the team that developed and maintains the language gives up. Suddenly you are faced with a project that depended on a language that is now dead.

This happens. Because of this, 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 long time. This is one area you don't want to gamble on. If a language appears to be not well maintained, you should think twice before considering it as an option.

Your development team

This is an important factor to take into consideration. If you have a team full of renowned JavaScript developers, the choice is obvious. That is unless JavaScript doesn't meet your project's needs. Or maybe JavaScript is the perfect solution for your project and you don't have enough famous developers who know the language. If you're lucky, the available development team will be perfectly capable of working with the perfect language for your project.

By considering these three elements, you are already ahead of the game and the decision will begin to become clear.

Top 5 Programming Languages ​​for AWS Cloud Computing

When we think about the best programming languages ​​for AWS cloud computing, we really don't need to look beyond the top 5 languages ​​used on the platform. This metric alone tells us that any of these 5 languages ​​could be a solid choice for your project, as long as the chosen language can serve the project.

For example, you certainly wouldn't choose Python to create a modern front-end for a web application. You also wouldn't select JavaScript to work with big data. Each language has its limitations, so you will need to know the needs of your project as well as the purpose of the project.

If you know that you are creating a single-page application that will be viewed on mobile devices, you will need to select a suitable language for this purpose. If you are creating a web application that will work with large amounts of data and Artificial Intelligence, the language you choose must be able to meet these criteria.

There is more to this choice than you have probably considered. But if you take a look at the top 5 AWS programming languages, you will see that each of them serves a specific purpose. And in the end, you may find that you need to work with more than one of these languages ​​to complete the project. Since all of these languages ​​have sizable communities around them, there's a good chance you'll find everything you need to make them work together to bring this project to life.

That said, let's take a look at the top 5 programming languages ​​for AWS.

#1Python

Python is an interpreted language, which means it is not compiled. Each line of code is executed one at a time using the Python interpreter. Python's most popular use cases include website and software development, task automation, data analysis, AI/ML, and data visualization. If your project has something to do with big data or Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, you will probably need to use Python.

Another big advantage of Python is that it is one of the easiest languages ​​to learn. And by having a huge 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 only thing to keep in mind with Python is that due to the limitations of Global Interpreter Lock, it does not scale across multiple cores on a single machine as well as some other languages.

#2Java

Java has been around long enough to have become a very important language for many different use cases. And while you might think that Java isn't a good fit for cloud-native development, the language has been adapted and adopted for all types of development projects.

One of the biggest benefits of Java is its huge community. Additionally, Java has a very robust ecosystem, as well as more documentation than you will ever need, many libraries and frameworks, extensive security, and a global group of developers.

Java is great for ecommerce and is the main language for Android development. Therefore, if your cloud-native projects involve mobile devices, Java should be an important consideration.

#3 JavaScript

If your project requires dynamic and interactive web content to be delivered through applications or web browsers, you will 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 be done with JavaScript.

And since JavaScript is one of the popular languages ​​on the market, you can bet it has a huge community and a bright future, and many of its developers will already know how to use it.

Of course, the one thing you should know about JavaScript is that your developers will also need to have a solid understanding of HTML and CSS.

#4 C++

C++ is one of the most popular object-oriented languages ​​on the planet. It is 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 indicate that it is a very solid option for your cloud native needs. These IoT devices will have to communicate with your cloud to deliver payloads of data for processing.

With C++ and AWS, you can do things like create Android apps 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. The fact that it can work with AWS is a huge bonus for any company looking to build and deploy on 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 the Cloud9 IDE. With PHP you can develop containerized applications and serverless applications and work seamlessly with AI/ML.

The combination of PHP and AWS makes it possible to build and deploy highly available web applications that can also be monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. There are many APIs to use with PHP and all the documentation you can imagine.

PHP is a very robust language and has a very large community, which ensures that it will not only enjoy an ever-growing feature set but also have 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, email lists, image processing/generation, data analysis , dynamic website templates and WordPress plugins. When your developers put their mind to it, there's little they can't create with PHP, AWS, and the plethora of tools available for the language.

Conclusion

This will be one of the most important decisions you will make on your project. Choose wisely and everything will go well and on time. Choose poorly and your teams will struggle to complete the task on time.

And don't forget, in the end, you will probably have 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.