PHP Development Trends In 2024
Last year I posted PHP Development Trends In 2023 based on The Zend 2023 PHP Landscape Report. And now The Zend 2024 PHP Landscape Report is now available! This annual report is based on a survey of the PHP ecosystem, and details how teams deploying, managing, and overseeing PHP-based applications are working with PHP today — including top pain points and forward-looking plans for development and modernization of their applications.
In this post I want to highlight several points from this reports.
About the Survey
The Zend 2024 PHP Landscape Report is based on the results of an anonymous survey of self-identified PHP users and administrators that was conducted between the months of October and December in 2023. The survey received a total of 572 valid responses.
They came from Europe (42.83%) and North America (29.02%) had the largest representation in this survey. South America, Asia, and the United Kingdom rounded out the top five with 7.69%, 7.17%, and 4.72% of responses, respectively.
The top industry selected in this year’s survey was Technology at 28.32%, followed by Consulting or Professional Services at 12.24%. Among respondents that selected Other, marketing was the top write-in response.
PHP Application Development Trends
As with the previous two years of survey, the top three application categories were Services or APIs (78.06%), Internal Business Applications (64.14%), and Content Management Systems (44.94%). Rounding out the top five were eCommerce (35.65%), and CRM / ERM Systems (29.75%).
PHP’s ongoing popularity and suitability for the web: horizontal scaling. You can spin up more application instances when you need to scale your application up, instead of taking down the application to provision a larger, more capable server. Horizontal scalability helps reduce total cost of ownership, particularly when deploying to the cloud, as you can scale back when your traffic goes down, reducing your costs.
Deployment Trends
At the top of the list for 2024 was On-Premises, with 48.84% of respondents noting that they have at least one on-premises deployment. Running down the list, Amazon Web Services and “Other” represented 39.34% and 22.48% of respondents, respectively. Among those who selected “Other,” respondents listed a number of popular hosting providers, and less common cloud platforms.
In the 2023 PHP Landscape Report, there was a cloud provider AWS, take the top spot for PHP application deployment for the first time; this year has reversed that trend — and in a quite significant way, as this is the highest number of respondents in the past three years indicating on premise deployment as their choice. In talking with customers and prospects, and there are many discuss moving back to on premise deployment as a way to reduce operations costs, as well as secure business and customer data. This choice is clearly more popular with larger companies, where they have the space and personnel to run these data centers.
For those companies choosing to deploy to the cloud, there’s a clear bifurcation of preference based on organization size. While AWS is the lead choice regardless of company size, smaller companies show a preference for Digital Ocean over more “enterprise-y” clouds such as Azure and GCP.
Web Server Trends
The top choice among application servers in our survey was Apache, at 69.96% of responses, followed by nginx at 60.85%. IIS, which simultaneously jumped in ranking to number three and decreased in percentage use year over year, came in at 6.01%.
This marks the second year in a row where observed relative parity between Apache HTTPD and nginx. What’s interesting about this year, however, is that both solutions gained adoption, fully at the expense of other web server solutions.
Considering that the FrankenPHP project, which provides a PHP application server on top of Caddy, has reached a stable release in recent months.
Container Trends
This survey found 58.91% of respondents noting that they are currently using container technologies, with an additional 13.57% planning on using container technologies within the next 12 months. 27.52% of respondents reported no plans to use container technologies in the future.
Looking at these results year over year, container technology adoption stayed relatively flat, with a slight increase (57.52% to 58.91%) in those indicating usage of container technologies. Year over year, those planning to use container technologies in the next 12 months fell significantly (19.79% to 13.57%), while those reporting not using container technologies and not having plans to do so increased (22.70% to 27.52%).
As with previous survey, large companies more likely to indicate usage of container technologies than smaller companies, with 65.69% adoption vs. 54.49% respective adoption.
Top Container Technologies
This survey found Docker as the top selection at 93.75%, followed by Podman (8.07%), containerd (5.37%), Other (5.47%), and CRI-O (1.82%). Among those who selected Other, the most common write- in responses were FreeBSD, OpenShift, and LXC.
Looking at those choices year over year, there was a significant uptick in Docker adoption (68.34% to 93.75%), and moderate dips in Podman (10.22% to 8.07%), containerd (9.38% to 5.37%), and CRI-O (8.54% to 1.82%).
Top Orchestration Technologies
Top choices included Kubernetes (52.05%), Docker Compose / Swarm (45.74%), and Terraform (25.55%). Rounding out the top five were Ansible and AWS Cloud Formation at 23.97% and 16.09% respectively.
Looking at selections year over year, Kubernetes usage climbed (44.81% to 52.05%), while Ansible (31.90% to 23.97%), Terraform (27.85% to 25.55%), AWS Cloud Formation (25.32% to 16.09%), and Helm (19.49% to 15.46%) all dropped in popularity.
Security And Compliance Trends
This survey asked respondents to share their confidence level in the security of their PHP applications. As you’ll see in the data below, that level of confidence is correlated with other data points from the survey, and the need to meet compliance standards.
Looking at the unsegmented results, over half of respondents noted they were “Very Confident” in the security of their PHP applications, followed by 26.58% at “Somewhat Confident” and 18.14% “Extremely Confident”. Combined, 95.35% of respondents noted positive sentiment around their PHP application security.
When looking at the results for respondents who identified needing to meet compliance requirements, there was a jump in the percentage (50.63% to 56.98%) of results who were “Very Confident” in their PHP application security.
Compliance Standards
This survey asked those who indicated they need to meet compliance requirements to share the requirements that they adhere to for their PHP applications. Our survey found GDPR as the top selected option at 69.68%, followed by ISO 27001 at 20.65% and PCI DSS at 20.32%. Rounding out the top five, Internal compliance standards and EU e-Privacy Directive attracted 19.68% and 16.31%, respectively
Compliance requirements varied by region — with respondents in North, Central, and South America much less likely to select GDPR (45.22% vs. 95%) and EU e-Privacy Directive (5.22% vs 25.62%) than respondents from Europe and the UK.
PHP Version Adoption
This survey asked teams to identify the PHP versions used in their PHP applications, with the option to select multiple PHP versions if applicable. Respondents reporting using 2.43 different PHP versions, on average (not accounting for answer selections that had multiple PHP versions included). This was lower than 2023 survey, which found respondents selecting an average of 2.65 PHP versions.
The top version selected was PHP 8.2 at 57.17% of responses, followed by PHP 8.1 at 53.67%, and PHP 7.4 at 47.73%. Next were PHP 8.0, PHP 7.0–7.2, and PHP 7.3 at 34.79%, 18.36%, and 16.08%, respectively. Last on the list were PHP versions 5.6 and earlier at 15.91% of respondents.
Development Priorities From Respondents
This survey asked teams to share their 2024 development priorities. Users were asked to rate each category on a scale of one to five, with one indicating the lowest level of priority, and five indicating the highest. Echoing the results from our previous question, 44.30% of respondents setting the highest priority on Building New Features. In second, trailing our first place option by 3.58%, was Security at 40.72%. Improving code quality, Improving performance, and Deployment Automation / Orchestration represented 22.36%, 18.78%, and 11.18% of respondents, respectively.
Biggest PHP Challenge
This survey asked teams to weigh in on the biggest challenges they face in working with PHP, with the option to select multiple challenges as applicable. It found the top challenge for respondents to be Performance Issues at 37.8%, followed by Debugging at 33.26%. Dependency Management, Security, and Hiring were the next most common challenges at 26.78%, 25.70%, and 23.76% respectively.
While the top two challenges for teams stayed consistent year over year, Dependency Management jumped from 5th to 3rd, while hiring dropped from 4th to 5th. Integrations with other systems dropped from 3rd in 2023, to 7th in 2024.
When looking that top challenges for executive level positions, it found that Hiring jumped nearly 10%, and from the 5th most common challenge to 2nd.
There was increased challenge in hiring. It was curious if this is indicative of a decrease in PHP developers, or if the demand for PHP developers has increased in the past year.
The State Of PHP
This survey asked teams to share their level of agreement with four prompts regarding PHP. Respondents were asked to rank each category from one to five, with one representing the lowest level of agreement and five representing the highest level of agreement.
It found that respondents strongly agreed with the first three prompts, in that they Enjoy working with PHP, that It is easy to learn, and that If they were developing a new web app, they would use PHP. Most respondents disagreed with the statement that PHP is evolving too slowly.
Looking at these results year over year, it found that these opinions remained consistent. The statements “I enjoy working with PHP” and “PHP is easy to learn” increased in agreement year over year, while more people disagreed with the statement “PHP is evolving too slowly”.
There is a lot more data and analysis to unpack in The Zend 2024 PHP Landscape Report. It’s packed full of insights that you won’t want to miss, including
- Data and analysis on PHP version adoption, and how it varies across market segments
- Top PHP migration paths, pain points, and how they vary by firmographic profile
- Details on the state of PHP security and compliance, and forward-looking strategies
- Key shifts in PHP application deployment methodologies, including cloud strategies
- The top technologies used in developing and managing PHP applications
- Noteworthy trends and movements to watch in 2024 and beyond
- And more!
I would encourage readers that haven’t done so already to go and download the report!
