Happy New Year!

Enough of the celebration back to business.

What is the next hype you are looking for? Are you betting on GenAI, or which new kid on the block is hiding in the corner?

Believing Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech we have a bunch of good options. WebAssembly, Cloud Sustainability, Internal Developer Platforms and some Open Source Program Office are waiting next on the list. Yet, I believe outside the server (cloud) room, no one will become that much hyped. I personally can’t wait to see more adoption in those topics. In my work, with my team, and with the open-source community, we have all been working on this topic for a while. It is less a hype and more to be expected. But yet, it misses the adoption.

Sustainability, Wasm & IDPs

Handle this with care; I’m biased on those topics! However, I have the feeling those are the go-to topics for 2024 (besides GenAI).

Cloud Sustainability

There are multiple topics we have to take into account. Green Coding, Sustainable Infrastructure (hardware, cloudware), Eco Architecture, also Change Management, and overarching principles - such as setting requirements within the procurement process.

I recently published at the Linux Foundation Europe an overview of open-source foundations, which all tackle sustainability from different ankles. From that, it becomes pretty clear we have a movement. Events like the Green Coding Summit by SDIA or dedicated tracks for sustainability at the Open Source Summit underline this.

What is highly interesting in this field is the complexity of the moving parts and the speed at which new tools, methods, and specifications are developed. Measuring the IS situation isn’t as easy as with other static components; optimizing it not only requires better power utilization but also changing the system's architecture, maybe refactoring some code, scalability, and so on.

I find this topic so interesting not only for the greater good, but because it can become engineering wise complex and challenging. Does Sustainability in IT play a role in your organization?

WebAssembly (Wasm)

Wouldn’t a more secure, faster and leaner container alternative be great? No worries about the OS, just pure code. It's a Devs heaven.

Well, almost. Wasm isn’t going to erase containers, it’s more like a synergy partnership. However, the possibility and functionality to replace those parts of the systems that contain actual business logic is an absolute real use case. Platforms such as Fermyon Spin or Wasmcloud are even going further, providing a pure feature-oriented view.

Matt Butcher wrote a nice article at the New Stack about his 2024 Wasm predictions:

• Wasm is the perfect partner for AI: efficiency, speed, and security are the drivers for inferencing, and its portability also to GPUs allows its usage everywhere.

• The WASM standards will be finally defined this year; the WASI is crucial for the general availability, and the component model is a true game changer. “That means that for the first time in the history of computer science, libraries from arbitrary languages can work together. Your Rust app can import a Python library that in turn uses something written in Go.”

• Wasm will find its home and true adoption on server side.

• Running wasm apps in duality, Server Side and Client Side, outperforming any other common framework.

I really recommend you to read the article.

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)

I truly hate this name. It is the best try to describe the purpose of such platforms, and it might also be the best fit founded, but it sounds like a sneaky project that a bunch of people run under their table.

With the shortcomings of IT specialists, growing prices, and knowledge gaps, IDPs have become inevitable. Right now, most of them feel like a garage plug-and-play with tons of tools, but my guess is that we will see some holistic solutions this year. Maybe some of the commercial onces will do a big step forward, maybe we will see a FOSS alternative striving. RedHats Developer Hub could be such.

Placing DevOps practices in an organization-wide end-to-end delivery platform that welcomes devs, ops and other departments will empower future IT projects, faster time to market and highly reliable almost autonomous solutions.

What about Quantum Computing?

Last month, the IEEE Spectrum published an article on a realistic view of Quantum Computing. In short, it will take way longer to be useful because the use cases are not large and complex enough. Also, the communication on quantum computing isn’t clear, open and transparent. Most things tested failed, in some fictional experiments it opened up that running on an GPU will provide fast results then on a Quantum Computing. Industries such as banking, for example, are always highlighted as the big winners of quantum computing, but they are actually not. Natural science & life science are the sectors which will be able to do useful with it.

Time will tell, but I think we will have way more interesting changes in IT the next year, and quantum will most likely be only exciting in the Avengers movies.

See you later ;)

Max

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