Which cloud models are developers working with? The short answer is that many different models are in play.

Last month, we enlisted subscribers to SD Times and News on Monday to help us understand how they are building and testing applications using the cloud, and how they are deploying completed applications into the cloud. We had 425 responses—you can read many of their answers in last week’s Take, “Looking for the action? You’ll find it in the cloud.”

Let’s continue walking through the study. Of those who indicated that they are or soon will be using the cloud, the top 10 types of cloud they said they will use are:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): 54.4%
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): 40.9%
Private Cloud: 37.7%
Virtual Private Cloud: 34.2%
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): 32.7%
Hosted Virtual Machines: 27.8%
Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS): 26.7%
Public Cloud: 24.6%
Hybrid Cloud: 21.4%
Community Cloud: 8.2%

There’s quite a wide range of answers, which may indicate a wide variety of needs, or in my opinion reflects confusion in the marketplace. There’s little convergence or consistency in the use of phrases like Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

What about specific technologies being used for cloud computing? The study asked about that as well. The choices were a catchall: Some of them reflected messaging infrastructure, some were application frameworks, and others were presentation-layer technologies. Here are the top 15 responses from those who said they are using the cloud or plan to begin doing so soon:

HTML5: 60.9%
.NET: 57.3%
Cloud-enabled APIs: 53.0%
Virtual machines: 44.8%
HTML: 38.8%
Java EE: 37.7%
REST: 35.2%
SOAP: 28.1%
SOA: 21.7%
JDBC: 21.7%
ODBC: 16.4%
Spring: 10.3%
Hyper-V: 10.0%
Rails: 8.9%
JAX: 5.7%

With the high response for .NET notwithstanding, the most popular programming language for cloud-based development was reported to be Java. The top 15 responses, by those who are doing or plan to do cloud development, are:

Java: 59.6%
C#: 48.9%
Java Script/ECMAScript: 46.4%
C/C++: 28.9%
PHP: 28.9%
Visual Basic: 18.2%
PL/SQL: 17.1%
Python: 15.0%
Ruby: 14.6%
Perl: 9.6%
Groovy: 4.6%
Pascal/Delhi: 1.8%
Scala: 1.4%
Clojure: 1.1%
Erlang: 1.1%

Are you clear on the meaning of terms like SaaS, PaaS or IaaS? Which technologies and languages are your organizations using? Write me at feedback@bzmedia.com.

Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.