All the main trends for developers: 2022 edition

The year 2022 has shown how quickly forecasts of unforeseen developments can be overrun. Nevertheless, here is a look at trends expected to shape the DevOps landscape next year. Here is an overview of the top trends in the field that complement each other and are expected to prevail even next year. Let’s take a look together with SECLGroup

Everything as a code

Everything as a Code (EaC) is about writing infrastructure as software, whereby everything is expressed with code. This can be described as a methodology that treats applications as code. The concept also applies to all other IT components, such as operating systems, network configurations, and pipelines.

The infrastructure, i.e., servers, networks, and storage devices, whether on-premises or in the cloud, are defined as text/code files. This allows a company to automate and simplify its infrastructure.

GitOps

GitOps replaces the standard DevOps workflow with a source code (Git) repository. The key to this is using Git as a single source of truth and a control mechanism for creating and updating the system architecture.

In this model, changes to the Git repository are made via pull requests and then automatically forwarded to the live infrastructure, reducing both planned and unplanned downtime through fast and reliable implementations.

Meaning of UX

Software development is not just about functionality. It’s also about ease of use. This means that users must be able to quickly understand the operation of the applications, regardless of their size or complexity. User experience (UX) has become a critical business factor in recent years and will continue to determine how companies design products and services in the future. Therefore, from 2022, developers will increasingly be challenged to concentrate on this area and work together with UX and UI designers. 

 DevSecOps

DevSecOps is increasingly concerned about developers’ access to the entire stack. Extensive permissions assigned to developers could lead to massive destruction of the cloud infrastructure, either by an insider threat or by mistake. For this reason, DevSecOps teams monitor activities and access to identify access to permissions and, on this basis, assign the least privileges.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible open-source platform for containers. Kubernetes can operate distributed systems stably. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, offers deployment patterns, and much more. Kubernetes has now marginalized Docker’s alternative offer. It is now the most important open source initiative alongside Linux. Kubernetes is flexible and portable, and supports multi-cloud. Kubernetes increases developer productivity by enabling them to use GitOps. Teams can be scaled and deployed faster.

Almost perfect digital experiences

Within a very short time, the provision of almost perfect digital experiences became a technological novelty. As the number of applications skyrocketed and the cloud infrastructure became omnipresent, front-end development became the focus. 

A shift left approach to security and compliance

Until now, security and compliance practices have mainly been reactive because the teams tried to fix security problems after creation. With a “shift left” approach, developers and security teams work together to proactively identify security issues before cloud resources are deployed. This approach improves developer productivity greatly.

Balanced development automation

Another trend is moving from software development automation to balanced development automation, including testing. Software development, which is a critical process for every company today, is evolving from automated tech pipelines to streams of value, in which “cross-functional” means that they also involve other parts of the company beyond IT.

Code-as-a-Service

Code-as-a-Service will accelerate the use of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service – and thus Cloud Computing. CaaS meets the ever-growing need for universal development (as opposed to individual platforms such as iOS or Android) and also offers integrated modules for artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and blockchain that give developers easy access to these popular technologies.

Changes in container development

For some time, Docker has been one of the most popular container solutions competed by Mesos, Swarm, and Kubernetes. Now the latter has taken the lead. Kubernetes has built a loyal community and established itself as a global authority in container development.

Kubernetes will assert itself as the industry standard for container development as more and more developers are moving away from Docker as a preferred solution.

Focus on the cloud

The years 2021 and 2022 have shown how important cloud services are: they can be scaled up or down if necessary. While some industries flourished during the COVID-19 pandemic, others (tourism) suffered a sharp decline in demand. Companies with cloud-based platforms avoided paying for data center services they didn’t need. Therefore, many more companies are likely to relocate their operations to the cloud in 2022 – cloud architects are more in demand than ever.

AI

AI is expected to continue to gain importance in 2022, as companies with AI-supported capabilities are likely to be successful. The area of natural language processing (NLP), which allows computers to write texts and software programs, is particularly interesting. AI can be used in diverse fields of our lives, so it is expected to develop. 

A wave of low-code/no-code development

The demand for software engineers is bigger than the offer, so low-code/no-code (LCNC) programming is a must for companies that must be able to easily drive new initiatives. This type of software also allows people without development training to create databases and other applications to support agile processes. This capability is becoming more and more common and will continue to increase in 2022 and beyond.

Conclusion

The software development industry is much larger than the parts of it discussed in this material, so it is impossible to cover all the important aspects of this industry in one go. However, here are some significant trends that can play a very important role in the life of any programmer.