Thread by @danielbryantuk

The latest @InfoQ DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report has been published 📊

Key topics:
- Data Observability
- FinOps
- eBPF and WASM
- Supply chain security
- Low/no-code platforms
- "Developer Experience as Decision Driver”

Read on to learn more 🧵 👇

@InfoQ Every year, several @InfoQ editors and members of the community get together to share their opinions on the current state of the DevOps and cloud space.

We aim to track the diffusion of technologies, methodologies, and topics in this space

Here is our current take:

@InfoQ The model we use is taken from @geoffreyamoore's diffusion of innovation & "Crossing the Chasm" ⛰️

As pointed out by @swardley, we shouldn't confuse diffusion and evolution (the linked thread provides more context and highlights the value of mapping)

https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1519580815885312001

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley And although every model is wrong, some are useful 😁 For me, the diffusion of innovation provides a great hook to discuss current trends and attempt to peak into the future of cloud and DevOps 🔮

Let's dive a little deeper... 🤿

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley 1/ Data Observability 👁️

Data Observability can help us better understand and troubleshoot our data-intensive systems.

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley To begin, great insight was shared by @lenadroid on the topic of Data Observability, with a hat tip to @BM_DataDowntime for coining the term

“Data Observability is an organization’s ability to fully understand the health of the data in their systems.”

montecarlodata.com/blog-what-is-d…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime And naturally, @mipsytipsy and the @honeycombio team got a shout-out for all of the great work they are doing in the observability space

charity.wtf/2020/03/03/obs…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio 2/ FinOps practices continue to mature 💵 📉

Awareness of cloud spending has increased and related product offerings have evolved to provide better insights

We believe this topic should move to the early adopter’s stage.

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio Both @SteefJan and Renato highlighted the continuing adoption of FinOps, and they recommended that enterprise leaders learn more

"More companies have become cost aware of their cloud spending and adopted the practices from the FinOps Foundation"

learn.finops.org

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan They also gave a shout-out to the latest "State of FinOps Report" 2021

data.finops.org

This presented a clear takeaway: cloud financial management (i.e., FinOps) has become a mainstream practice in large organizations across all sizes of cloud spending

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan 3/ eBPF and WASM are exciting new technologies that are being used to unlock new approaches to observability, monitoring, and security 🌽

This is particularly evident within the domains of service meshes and ingress/API gateway

We believe this is in the innovator's stage

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan First to mention eBPF was @mostlyRadwan, highlighting that "there are many applications of eBPF including the monitoring and debugging of applications."

@newrelic's pixie is interesting for monitoring and @falco_org for security

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org And I highlighted that the @ciliumproject folks have done great work with eBPF for providing service mesh-like networking extensions in the kernel

cilium.io/blog/2020/11/1…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject The @Google and Envoy teams have made a lot of great progress in adding extensibility via Wasm plugins into @EnvoyProxy

The folks over at @Tetrateio have shared a lot of great info on this:

tetrate.io/blog/wasm-modu…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio 4/ Supply chain security: 🦹 vs 🦸

Supply chain attacks have increased dramatically over the past year, and new innovations have been introduced to help combat this 🔏

We expect to see more companies improving as attacks continue to increase in complexity

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio A report from @AquaSecTeam found that supply chain security attacks increased by 300% from 2020 to 2021 without a similar increase in the level of security

infoq.com/news/2022/01/a…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam In response to the increase in attacks, the Open Source Security Foundation (@theopenssf) announced the Alpha-Omega Project to improve supply chain security across open source software (OSS) projects.

infoq.com/news/2022/02/o…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf 5/ Low/no-code platforms 🏗️ 🧰

Low- or no-code platforms continue to mature, especially for internal tooling and automation uses.

This maturing of the platforms in both usability and effectiveness will allow innovator companies to start to leverage this technology better.

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf As noted by @tracymiranda, Executive Director at the @CDFoundation:

“with low code and no code, ‘citizen’ developers are empowered to build applications and help unclog always-under-pressure IT departments.”

infoq.com/articles/finan…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation There are also several great low-code articles on InfoQ from @hudgeon that provide useful insight

"Low-code platforms can be grouped into three different categories: UI generation software, integration software, and transformation software"

infoq.com/articles/low-c…

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon 6/ "Developer Experience as Decision Driver” 🧑‍💻 💸

We see this trend gaining more traction, particularly within the cloud platform space.

The role of “Platform Engineer” is emerging to support the building of related platform abstractions, APIs, and tooling

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon Both @lenadroid and I had a lot to say about this trend 😁

Lena framed the conversation perfectly:

"Developer Experience is becoming an increasingly crucial factor in developers’ decisions to advocate for specific technology adoption."

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon And continued: "A lack of good Developer Experience may mean a risk or a bottleneck for significant capabilities, like scalability, automation, speed of innovation, or even security." 💯

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon I’m also seeing this trend in the platform space. Cloud-native engineers are increasingly becoming “full cycle developers" and need to code, ship, and run applications

netflixtechblog.com/full-cycle-dev…

DevEx plays a large role in successful tooling adoption

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon I'm also seeing the role of “Platform Engineer" is rising up within all sizes of organizations

From a technical perspective, the Spotify team has long talked about how they create “Golden Paths” and Netflix has a similar approach to “Paved Roads”

https://twitter.com/danielbryantuk/status/1494614250567966732

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon You can read the full "DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report – June 2022" here: infoq.com/articles/devop…

And don't forget to follow @InfoQ for more news and articles!

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon Massive thanks to @SteefJan and @BeardedCoder for organizing the report, and @lenadroid, @FeynmanZhou, @MostlyRadwan, @shaaron2010, and Renato Losio for sharing their insights! 🙌

@InfoQ @geoffreyamoore @swardley @lenadroid @BM_DataDowntime @mipsytipsy @honeycombio @SteefJan @mostlyRadwan @newrelic @falco_org @ciliumproject @Google @EnvoyProxy @Tetrateio @AquaSecTeam @theopenssf @tracymiranda @CDFoundation @hudgeon @BeardedCoder @FeynmanZhou @shaaron2010 Thanks for reading, and please share your thoughts! 🙏

Do you agree with our opinions? 🤔 What did we get wrong, and what did we miss? 🕵️