The world of IT is constantly changing. For professionals in various sectors, knowing about the latest trends in computer development and everything related to software (business management and other software types) can be beneficial. Here is an update on the subject.
Cloud
Cloud management and control will become increasingly important. Previously, there was a tendency to migrate to the cloud "at all costs"; in 2019, managing the waste associated with cloud spending will receive special attention.
There should be no significant changes in overall cloud trends in 2020. In an environment of heightened geopolitical tensions, we can also expect an even stronger desire to keep data within national territories, and to keep it "out of the United States". Nor should we expect AWS to disappear, as it is growing faster than any other cloud provider. Having healthy competition is good; and the fact that Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM enjoy real stability is also good for the industry. The growth of Azure in particular should accelerate the success of the cloud in Europe.
More and more companies are expected to migrate aggressively to the public cloud and to develop net-new applications there. Whether workloads are in the public cloud or on-site, IT teams are increasingly moving to platforms that offer "dynamic" rather than "static" resource allocation, meaning automatic scalability, dynamic routing, FaaS (Function as a Service) and other "serverless" technologies.
DevOps
As more responsibility for production code falls on developers in 2019, production code instrumentation will be ubiquitous. Monitoring and intelligence will be key to helping DevOps teams identify priority areas and reliability opportunities.
DevOps engineers will increasingly use algorithms and machine learning to promote automation. While existing tools make it easy to collect data, the challenge will be to find the people who can decide how to use that data. In the face of rapid industry change, individuals and companies are finding it difficult to keep up with the times. They face the challenge of finding and keeping employees who combine experience with innovative ideas.
Microservices
In 2019, the factors driving the rapid adoption of microservices may become increasingly clear. One of the dangers of migrating to a services architecture is that users are not always aware of the size that these services can reach. Some groups are creating a microservices architecture which, instead of relying on one monolithic system, relies on ten. This makes their services too large and does not solve the problem of the monolith. Conversely, if companies realize that their microservices are too small, they become extremely complex. Managing their complexity becomes a much bigger problem for the system to handle.
Open Source
There should be a growing adoption of open source technologies, resulting from the continued difficulties of companies facing the multiplicity of tools and platforms that are supposed to work together. Interoperable tools that integrate seamlessly into the growing DevOps ecosystem will become increasingly important.
IT skills
The skills most in demand depend on the nature of the business. To enable them to succeed, many well-established companies undertaking DevOps and cloud transformations need individuals with an operational mindset, software engineering tools and the social engineering skills to integrate teams into the process. They often do not have the data they need. As a result, they are looking to recruit profiles that can instrument both software and infrastructure to have a good visibility of the system and to monitor the progress of the numerous migrations: from monolithic to microservice, from on-site to cloud, or from silos to the convergence of Dev and Ops teams.
Younger companies are often born with the cloud and DevOps. They want to attract employees who have extensive real-world experience in orchestration management, high performance, and high complexity. These companies are drowning in data and need staff with insight based on skills and experience to bring out the important information.
Regardless of their maturity, all companies today are interested not in how much code a developer can produce, but in how that code is used by customers. It is therefore crucial to link the engineers' metrics to the customer experience. For example, the key performance indicators on a dashboard indicate the performance of components, but do not always reflect the customer's experience of the final product. Teams need tools to make sense of the data and to enable them to understand reliability issues in depth, rather than simply to identify the occurrence of an issue.
Faced with the increasing complexity of systems, automation and machine learning are essential tools. Companies need to surround themselves with talent that understands how to connect these tools to the people who run these systems.
