ThoughtWorks unveiled its 2015 Technology Radar in Sandton recently, offering a snapshot view of the latest thinking on software development trends and priorities.
The Technology Radar is an bi-annual assessment compiled by the ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board of current and emerging technologies and tools being deployed by the company’s software engineers and clients.
One of the big take-aways in the latest report is the explosive growth in the DevOps movement that is driving new thinking in software development. This growth is being driven by the adoption of cloud computing services that has irrevocably changed how organisations handle and access their own, as well as third-party data.
DevOps therefore attempts to introduce new approaches that leverage the advantages of cloud services in conjunction with the benefits of the agile development methodology.
The rise of DevOps has far-reaching implications for software development as it touches on all aspects of the discipline.
The ThoughtWorks Technology Radar notes that in order to stay true to the agile methodology, developers have adopted techniques to adapt and react on the fly.
This is particularly apt in environments that are reliant on external code and sources.
The top trends that have emerged to circumvent these challenges include:
* Canary builds – a technique for updating dependencies to the latest version on a daily basis while ensuring the detection of breaking changes;
* Datensparsamkeit –promoting the philosophy of collecting and retaining the absolute least amount of user data required; and
* Hipster batch – which is based on using batch processing techniques in combination with cloud technology rather than a constantly live feed.
These techniques to solve the modern-day challenges of integration across services and data sources are highly reliant on the data platforms used. The Technology Radar therefore proposes that organisations consider techniques such as the Data Lake and Lambda Architectures as new ways of interrogating enterprise data platforms.
These two architectures have gained traction because they allow for continuous, real time processing that mimics how data flows in a real world context.
Three platforms that ThoughtWorks suggests are ripe for assessment are:
* Apache Mesos – a platform that abstracts out underlying computing resources to make it easier to build massively scalable distributed systems;
* CoreOS – a lightweight Linux distribution designed to run large, scalable systems using Docker containers; and
* Jackrabbit Oak – a scalable and performant implementation of hierarchical content repository for use as the foundation of a content management system.
The Technology Radar notes that the biggest threat to organisations adopting these approaches and technologies is security risk. This therefore calls for appropriate tools to overcome the ever-present threat to company and user data.
The top three tools that emerge in the report for consideration are:
* Blackbox – a simple tool for securely storing application secrets (keys/password) in a VCS repo;
* Time-based One-time Password two-factor authentication; and
* OpenID Connect – this forms part of the OpenAM suite that supports a variety of federated identity standards.
These insights are but a sampling of the entire report that delves deeper into the thinking and advantages that different technologies and tools have to offer.