2023 Hotness: Cloud IDEs, Web Assembly and SBOMs

SEATTLE — Cloud IDEs are hot, but several other trends are taking shape in 2023 that Cloud Native Computing Foundation‘s Chief Technology Officer Chris Aniszczyk highlights in this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers podcast.

The conversation was recorded at CloudNative SecurityCon. Here’s a breakdown of what we covered:

• Cloud IDEs (or integrated development environments) will mature as GitHub’s Codespaces platform gains acceptance through its integration into the GitHub service. Other factors include new startups in the space, such as GitPod, which offers a secure, cloud-based IDE, and Uptycs, which uses telemetry data to lock down developer environments. “So I think you’ll, you’re just gonna see more people exposed to it, and they’re gonna be like, ‘Holy crap, this makes my life a lot easier,'” Aniszczyk said.
• FinOps reflects the more stringent views on managing costs, focusing on the efficiency of resources that a company provides for developers. The focus also translates to the GreenOps movement with its emphasis on efficiency.
• Software bills of materials (SBOMs) will continue to mature with Sigstore as the project with the fastest expected adoption. Witness is another SBOM project. The SPDX community has been at the center of the movement for over a decade now before people cared about it.
• GitOps and OpenTelemetry: This year, KubeCon submissions topics on GitOps were super high. OpenTelemetry is the second most popular project in the CNCF, behind Kubernetes.
• Platform engineering is hot. Aniszczyk cited Backstage, a CNCF project, as one he is watching. It has a healthy plugin extension ecosystem and a corresponding large community. People make fun of Jenkins, but Jenkins is likely going to be around as long as Linux because of the plugin community. Backstage is going along that same route.
• WebAssembly: “You will probably see an uptick in edge cases, like smaller deployments as opposed to full-blown cloud-based workloads,” Aniszczyk said. “WebAssembly will mix with containers and VMs. It’s just the way that software works.”
• Kubernetes is part of today’s distributed fabric. Linux is now everywhere. Kubernetes is going through the same evolution. Kubernetes is going into airplanes, cars, and fast-food restaurants. “People are going to focus on the layers up top, not necessarily like, the core Kubernetes project itself,” Aniszczyk told us. “It’s going to be all the cool stuff built on top.”

2023 Hotness: Cloud IDEs, Web Assembly, and SBOMs

Alex Williams is founder and publisher of The New Stack. He's a longtime technology journalist who did stints at TechCrunch, SiliconAngle and what is now known as ReadWrite. Alex has been a journalist since the late 1980s, starting at the...

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