Data, workflow integration, and open source tools are among the trends that Jason Warner, GitHub senior vice-president of technology, identifies as key for company success in 2018.
Data, writes Warner, will be the biggest factor on the rise in 2018:
Today all companies are data companies, whether they know it or not. In 2018, so long as teams know how to use it, data will become their greatest asset.
The growing importance of data will also mark the shift from the Cloud as a distributed computing platform to the Cloud as a platform for data processing, including analytics and machine learning. This will attract more emphasis on three key areas:
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Many critical systems are currently vulnerable, says Warner, in spite of their surface areas getting bigger and bigger. To counteract attacks, which are going to become more frequent in 2018, there will be more attention to allocate financial and development resources aimed to improve security. In particular, Warner stresses, security has to be an integral part of the code and cannot be simply added in production. Security is an area where Warner sees a big impact from the current focus on machine learning, eventually leading to building systems organized in layers that are automatically secured.
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Cloud infrastructure will see the growth of tools and services aimed to make infrastructure less of a concern for developer, who will be freer to focus on building their products and projects. This process will be tied to what Warner calls “workflow war”:
Mergers and acquisitions will heat up as big tech companies snatch up smaller ones focusing on the developer experience, solving infrastructure problems, and building better workflow tools.
- Open source software will continue to be big in 2018 and will be a serious competitor for investments for many companies developing closed-source systems. This trend has actually been strong for the last ten years, according to Warner, with many major companies open-sourcing their software and others bringing technologies like Kubernetes to the playing field, which are becoming the foundation of many developers’ workflows.
Finally, a big reason for concern for Warner is the current fight that is being delivered about net neutrality, whose next phase will be FCC vote on December 14.
2018 will decide the future of net neutrality, and we’ll feel the impact no matter the outcome.