Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to wield a significant usage advantage by the software developer community over rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) though that advantage is starting to wane. That angle is provided by a survey of more than 17,000 software developers put together by SlashData and released by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The survey found that AWS was the most used public cloud foundation with 62% of cloud native and 45% of non-cloud native developers stating their primary use of AWS. However, that cloud native number was down 6 percentage points compared to the same survey conducted last year, with the survey noting most of that loss was to smaller cloud ecosystems such as DigitalOcean, Salesforce, Red Hat, and SAP.

GCP was the second most-used cloud platform by backend developers, with 47% of cloud native and 36% of non-cloud native developers using the cloud service. Azure was a close No. 3 in usage with 42% of cloud native and 32% of non-cloud native developers using the Microsoft platform.

Tangentially, AWS was also the most used third-party private cloud platform by cloud native developers. But, like the public cloud findings, AWS has seen its private cloud advantage shrink from 60% of respondents last year to 52% this year.

“Since the cloud native population is growing, competing vendors are catching up with AWS to claim part of the growing population, and therefore AWS is losing market share,” an accompanying analysis of the survey data notes. “Similarly, developers new to the cloud native ecosystem might come with potential new needs that are not fully covered by the AWS offering.”

Google and Microsoft maintained their No. 2 and No. 3 position among cloud native developers using third-party private cloud platforms.

The survey also found that somehow 14% of backend developers had not heard of Kubernetes compared to just 5% that had not heard of containers. That lack of Kubernetes awareness was also highlighted by the largest percentage of respondents (35%) stating that while they were “aware” of Kubernetes, they were either not interested or did not have a use for the platform.

The awareness aspect was somewhat explained by a large percentage of respondents stating that they used a managed container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform. Amazon was the most used by the developer community with 68% or respondents stating they used its Elastic Container Service (ECS)/Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), ahead of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) used by 27%, and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) used by 24%. As those platform names indicate, all use Kubernetes as their underlying container orchestrator.

“This suggests that developers may either be unaware of the engine underlying the solution or do not consider that as using Kubernetes,” the survey notes. “Nevertheless, this shows that the market is strongly shaped by Kubernetes and managed Kubernetes services.”

The CaaS results were similar to ones released by CNCF earlier this year as part of an internal developer survey that showed 30% of respondents were using EKS, followed by 27% using GKE.

AWS also controls the most used serverless platform by developers questioned in the survey. AWS’ Lambda platform was used by 46% of serverless developers, followed by 38% using Google Cloud Functions, and 29% using Azure Functions. The survey noted that while AWS continues to lead this space based on it being one of the first to market, Google had gained 8 percentage points since the last survey.