A Cloudflare report, based on usage of its services, shows that Go is now the most used language for API clients – overtaking Node.js – and that AWS is the public cloud of choice for public-facing websites among the top 5000 domains.

The Cloudflare Radar Year in Review uses data from a variety of sources. The business is best known for network services including a global content delivery network. The data in the Radar is drawn from use of its services, but needs careful interpretation.

According to Cloudflare, more than half of the internet traffic it sees is API related, and its analysis shows that Go has become the most popular language for developing API clients – accounting for 11.8 percent, ahead of Node.js at 10 percent and Python at 9.6 percent. Go was developed by Google as a compiled language with static typing, strong concurrency, memory safety, and ease of programming thanks to garbage collection, making it well suited for API clients. 

In 2023 a similar report put Node.js at 14.6 percent, Go at 8.4 percent and Java in third place at 7 percent – showing remarkable increases for both Go and Python (6.8 percent last year).

Another section of the report looks at the technology used by the top 5000 domains, ranked by traffic to the Cloudflare DNS resolver, and analyzed by the Cloudflare URL Scanner. Note that this report is not representative of general usage, nor does it account for internal applications. One of its findings is the dominance of AWS in this context – used by 62.3 percent of these domains, versus Microsoft’s Azure at just 4.8 percent (behind both WP Engine at 8.5 percent and Vercel at 6.1 percent).

There is also a look at the frameworks and libraries in use by these domains. The top programming language is PHP (48.1 percent) – no doubt influenced by its use in the massively popular WordPress content management system, followed by Node.js at 27.9 percent and Java at 16.8 percent.

This part of the survey is confusing, though. For example, under JavaScript frameworks React is top at 36.6 percent, followed by Vue.js at 19.7 percent and Next.js at 12.6 percent. However this overlaps with the Web framework category, showing Next.js top at 32.8 percent, ahead of Express at 23 percent and Nuxt.js at 19 percent. Note that PHP, despite winning in “top programming language,” hardly features in this list – the highest PHP-based framework is Yii at 3.1 percent.

Exactly how Cloudflare defines a JavaScript framework is not stated, except that the categories are apparently based on those used by Wappalyzer. Cloudflare states that it uses “a Wappalyzer community fork to help identify technologies” in its URL Scanner.

A quick look at Wappalyzer’s own reports also shows dramatic differences in technology market share. According to its current “market share in 2024” report, Microsoft ASP.NET is the top web framework with 39.3 percent share, follows by Next.js at 19.5 percent and PHP-based Laravel at 7.2 percent. Wappalyzer tracks technology through a browser extension, and via its own web crawlers.

The big differences perhaps indicate that the top 5000 domains make different choices than the majority of sites – as well as suggesting caution in interpreting any of these figures.