Current technologies are crucial to accelerating business’. Speaking of the Software Development industry, there are many trends to keep an eye on as they are constantly and increasingly changing. It is true, global spending on IT fell by 5.4% in 2020, mainly due to the pandemic. However, since last year the sector has started to grow again, with an expected future expenditure of 3.8 trillion dollars. What does it mean? Surely, we cannot predict the future, but what has happened in the last period has taught us the importance of being prepared to face even the most unexpected situations. How? There are interesting trends in the IT industry that can help companies innovate and respond to different market’s challenges. Some examples include cloud computing, artificial intelligence or blockchain. Let’s dive deeper into the heart of the matter together.
HOW TO PROMOTE INNOVATION AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION THROUGH SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Software has now become the engine of innovation in companies, as confirmed by the 2021 Gartner Software Engineering Leaders Survey. Software engineering leaders rank “providing innovative software solutions” and “satisfying customers beyond their expectations” as the first two most rewarding aspects of their job. Promoting innovation and customer satisfaction, however, requires the modernization of software’s technologies, practices and architectures. Where should companies take priority action? According to experts, there are five main areas that will allow the achievement of important technological changes in software development. Let’s discover them together:
How to do it? According to Gartner research, by 2025 60% of new event-based applications will use serverless computing due to its elasticity, cost agility and low operational overhead. In addition, 70% of new cloud-native applications will adopt artificial intelligence to improve and automate observability. But there are other interesting IT trends to consider to reach the goals listed above and we will now talk about them.
CLOUD COMPUTING
Over the past two years, cloud computing has grown exponentially, mainly due to the pandemic and the work and business processes digitalization. According to Gartner’s forecasts, by 2022 it will grow even more, with a global spending level of 482 billion dollars. Why these investments? Cloud computing facilitates innovation and enables flexibility and business cost savings. An emerging and particularly interesting cloud trend is edge computing. It is an alternative approach to data processing and storage in the cloud environment, which involves the construction of data centers for computing and storage. These are located near the source of the information and no longer in a potentially distant central location. This is just one of many ways to make businesses more efficient, processing information in a decentralized way, reducing latency times and increasing application performance.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Cloud computing and artificial intelligence are closely related: artificial intelligence helps the cloud manage data and get specific information, while the cloud provides constant data backup and recovery in a virtual environment. Moreover, the adoption of artificial intelligence has grown exponentially in the last period due to the pandemic. According to IDC forecasts, the global artificial intelligence market should reach 500 billion dollars by 2024. It’s not a coincidence. Artificial intelligence can make companies in different sectors more efficient, from the banking industry to the health one. At an enterprise level, for example, AI software is very successful with the application of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It is a technology that automates mechanical and ordinary activities, so that skilled workers can focus on projects of higher value.
DevSecOps AND DevOps
DevOps is the process of integrating development and operations, while DevSecOps is one of its subset, which focuses on security. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, but they do have different goals. The word “DevOps” was introduced in 2009 by Patrick Debois to identify a way for developers and system administrators to communicate and collaborate better with each other. Therefore, the main purpose is to speed up and optimize communication between teams to reduce risk and increase software quality. DevSecOps has been identified as one of the main 2022 cybersecurity trends. It allows for earlier detection of potential security risks and streamlines the process of fixing vulnerabilities when they’re discovered. Also in this case we find the concept of collaboration as there are no longer barriers between development teams (focused on software) and IT engineers (focused on infrastructure), with the aim of sharing information while maintaining a high level of security, speed and control.
BLOCKCHAIN
Surely you have heard about Blockchain before and, despite the difficulties in establishing itself, it is still one of the most exciting technologies in the IT world. At the heart of the Blockchain we find a database that structures data in blocks connected to each other in a secure and decentralized way. What does it mean? Having the ability to keep track of transactions and the most sensitive data in a secure and reliable way.
MICROSERVICES AND API TECHNOLOGY
Let’s start by talking about the benefits that Microservices offer to software development: greater efficiency during product development and distribution, subdivision of applications into smaller parts for better management, optimization of communication between the individual parts of the application. This obviously assures to obtain a more efficient product development and distribution. Also, Microservices fits perfectly with Cloud Native development as the higher operational costs can be off-loaded to the Cloud with lower code complexity. So, for enterprises, Microservices are the reference architecture for 2022.
If we talk about a modern approach to software development, we cannot fail to mention the API technology that allows communication not only between client applications and backend applications but also between backend applications only. Which are the most used?
REST: developed in 2000 is one of the most used. Leverage World Wide Web and HTTP technology for client-server communication.
gRPC: developed by Google as a communication API between servers and based on RPC (Remote Procedure Call) technology. Unlike REST, which uses textual format (e.g., JSON, XML) to pass messages, gRPC uses Protocol buffer-based binary format.
GraphQL: developed by Facebook in 2015, API allows clients to define the shape of the data structure for a specific use case and fetch all the data of the flow.
As we can see, there are many trends in software development and they can make business processes more efficient, creating better products more quickly. In addition, we should expect more and more focus on developers’ potential and skills. Bit2win has accepted some of these new challenges, implementing them in its products to offer customers the best experiences. Tackling digital transformation means identifying the most interesting trends and making them your own, developing new products and services capable of responding to ever-changing market demands.
