We are living through years of great evolution and technological upheaval, with accelerations that are sometimes disorienting yet brimming with enthusiasm. Extremely fascinating times for those who grew up with technology, dream about it, and build businesses around it. Like us. What will happen in the coming years? Here are some considerations.
1. FinOps can no longer be postponed
The market crisis and international socio-political uncertainty are fueling ever-greater attention toward optimizing computing costs in the broadest sense. From the programming language used to write code, to the architectural solutions designed, to SaaS consumption models, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the nature of costs in order to modulate and control them from both an economic sustainability and an energy sustainability perspective.
We live in a time where making all stakeholders involved in the software lifecycle aware has become crucial and strategic, because it extends the awareness of how important it is to keep cost sources monitored and follow a cost-optimized approach.
According to the survey conducted in 2024 by the PoliMi Cloud Transformation Observatory, Cloud, particularly public Cloud, is confirmed as the primary platform for technological innovation, emerging as the predominant infrastructure for the development and testing of Artificial Intelligence, a central topic in digital markets. However, future challenges for decision-makers will involve the effective use of Cloud capabilities while maintaining cost control.
In the coming years, the discussion will continue: identifying a model that includes the best practices identified over the past couple of years is something organizations increasingly feel is necessary in order to orient themselves and have valid references in terms of best practices and tools to adopt.
READ ALSO:
FinOps: Why transition to Cloud financial management
Cloud Management: what is it and what are the benefits?
2. FinOps also means Green IT
As mentioned above, FinOps topics are intertwined in many ways with Green IT, an area where a particularly pressing yet complex issue is the identification of indicators. What does it mean to be green for a highly technological company or one that invests heavily in its technology stack? How do you measure it so that it doesn’t remain a pure marketing stance or a sincere yet ineffective attempt?
READ ALSO:
Green Cloud Computing: what it is and why it matters
GreenOps and FinOps: efficient and green cloud management
3. Platform engineering and DevX: never without them
And here they are, the hot topics of recent years, without a shadow of a doubt. The first PlatformCon held in 2023 brought together over 7,000 platform engineers and recorded record-breaking views of the proposed talks, just to give an idea. This is just one of the signals that Internal Developer Platforms are increasingly considered pivotal in the daily lives of developers, just as Developer Experience in a broader sense is now an essential aspect for the health of teams and, more generally, for the health of the company. Happy developers in an environment where the complexity of tools and solutions is managed results in greater productivity for application development and deployment and for the business, as well as an exponentially healthier mood. According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software-producing organizations will benefit from an internal platform of this kind.
Gartner expects that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery. Platform engineering will ultimately solve the central problem of cooperation between software developers and operators..
READ ALSO:
DX (Developer Experience): a guide for CIOs and CTOs
Platform Engineering vs DevOps: what are the differences?
4. Security, the eternal pain point
Yes, security never goes out of style. Especially because it’s not a matter of style. But why will it continue to be widely discussed? Because with the increasingly decisive adoption of Cloud Native applications and, more generally, Cloud Native architectures, complexities are destined to increase (you know the 4Cs of security, right? Cloud, Clusters, Containers, Code). Only through a truly DevSecOps approach will it be possible to progressively increase awareness of the importance of security at all project levels, starting from its very earliest phases.
READ ALSO:
Cloud DevSecOps: what it is, benefits, and tools
Container Security: what it is and how to achieve it
5. Open Source is the way
According to the Linux Foundation Europe report World of Open Source Europe Spotlight 2023, the value of open source has increased over the past year and is considered fundamental for the future of industrial sectors, particularly in generative AI. However, there is still much to be done in terms of contributions, public sector perceptions, and SBOM (Software Bill of Materials). The implementation by government bodies of open source alternatives to major proprietary vendors is an area of significant investment within the PNRR framework, for example, for ethical reasons and to avoid lock-in risk.
But while the adoption of open source solutions is increasingly widespread in companies, also thanks to the ever more mainstream diffusion of Kubernetes (in Italy there is still some resistance, admittedly), the area where the necessary trust has been lacking is precisely the one mentioned in the previous paragraph: security. But things are about to change: we will soon begin to see a more decisive use of open source tooling dedicated to security, historically the exclusive domain of major proprietary players. It will be interesting.
READ ALSO:
The Cyber Resilience Act, European competitiveness, and EU digital sovereignty
6. Skill shortage: it will continue to be a hot issue
According to Gartner, in 2022, 41% of spending on software development and infrastructure went to public cloud providers, a percentage expected to increase to 51% by 2025, with strong growth in cloud technologies anticipated in the coming years. Among the many implications these data carry, one is certainly tied to the need to find people who know how to do the work.
In recent years, we have seen how the job market in our sector has experienced erratic swings. The breaking down of geographical boundaries and the push toward remote work have, on one hand, enabled access to resources previously unthinkable to reach, and on the other, put companies that cannot afford an all-out salary war in a difficult position. Schedule flexibility and benefits of various kinds have also been brought into play, but the gap to be filled remains very wide. More developers, more architects, more cloud engineers are needed, and one of the most effective paths is upskilling, rather than aggressive and ruthless recruiting.
According to the 2024 State of Tech Talent Report conducted by the Linux Foundation, companies are choosing to prioritize upskilling and diversifying competencies over hiring, in order to broaden their staff’s capabilities in strategic areas such as Cloud, DevOps, cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.
7. Multi cloud: increasingly complex, but necessary
Digitalization is moving forward, more or less slowly depending on the target market, but it is moving forward. IoT and IIoT solutions, artificial intelligence applications in diagnostics, maintenance, and production, the fragmentation of application needs across different divisions will all push the accelerator toward the multi cloud framework.
Each vendor offers cloud services with specificities and guarantees suited to one or another vertical (think of complex manufacturing companies, for example). Meanwhile, additional layers of complexity are being added due to deglobalization and data sovereignty, with the related need for security and privacy protection. The difficulty of this type of choice, obviously, lies in understanding how to best manage distributed projects and control the related costs. Not exactly a walk in the park.
READ ALSO:
Serverless computing: what it is and how it works
Multi cloud orchestration: tips for doing it the right way
8. Artificial intelligence on everyone’s lips
Artificial Intelligence as a Service has been discussed for a few years, but it is only recently that it has become a key element in the market, think of services like ChatGPT or DALL-E. It is evident that the relationship between Cloud Computing and AI is inseparable at the current state of the art, and it will be interesting to see how third-party services will somehow be integrated and offered by vendors, presumably through the increasingly intensive use of APIs, serverless solutions, and model training.
Consider the example of Stable Diffusion: it is a state-of-the-art text-to-image model that generates images from text, whose distribution can be problematic since it currently requires specific, scalable hardware (GPU) with the correct pricing model. But both AWS and GCP offer solutions that lower the entry threshold for using the model, ensuring its scalability and accelerating its symbiotic evolution.
