Covid has pushed us to adopt distributed earlier then expected, leading to adopt more agile standards and technologies.
Welcome.. Interestingly you would find list of top 5, 8, 10 trends throughout the Internet, what we would share is something from an enterprise architecture prespective. What technologies and standards you should be plugged into to be future ready.
We would be covering these major technology trends :
Composable Architecture
Automation and Robotics
Cyber Security
Edge Computing augmenting Cloud Computing
AR and VR
Quantum Computing
Blockchains
IOT and 5G
Composable Architecture
With the new rise of ”SaaS”ification of most of the applications, this has become the need of the hour to move from a centralised to a more decentralised and a lego block based architecture. The benefits are huge from lower costs of ownership, being able to quickly adapt to market needs (agile), lower upgrade costs and downtimes. Composable architecrue is not simple and could lead to some headache aroud maintance, observability, resiliency, reliability, security and integration (due to multiple different patterns and integration options) if not done properly. Considering so many moving wheels it needs an underlying framework to work properly. Luckily these challenges can be taken care by implementing the right patterns and tools catering to these specifc needs. Observability can be taken care by implementing command centers using central dashboards powered by APM’s, cloud monitoring tools like istio, Log Management Solutions, cloud providers monitoring consoles which work cross platform.
Automation and Robotics
Running a system manually and seamlessly becomes an extensive challange and incurs high operational cost and errors. The only possibility is to automate workflows and business processes and reducing manual interventions. Adopting RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is one of the critical pillars for an effective DX. This could be a real pain if effective automation strategies are not picked and the solution isn’t intelligent itself and learn, but is rule driven. We can see a lot of SaaS and PaaS based automation platforms with few being completely no code. Another flavour of automation is with integration calling themselves as IPaaS (Integration platform as a Service). Zapier, RunAlloy , IFTTT (IF This then That) are few good automation cum integration platforms. Then there are few names which are leading this from the front like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft and PegaSystems. Automation can be dedicated to a particular use case like messaging, notifcations, stock management or a complete domain like commerce. RunAlloy calls itself a dedicated system for D2C brands (maybe more from branding standpoint).
Robotics can be an effective automation solution for transferring workforce to a more effective humane roles. Be it in warehouses, docks, maintenance, military, delivery, robotics can be an effective solution to many of these. A new flavour of Robotics called Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) is quickly catching up for a lot of the above mentioned UseCase.
Cyber Security
With world moving towards distributed, critical resources are getting exposed to the Internet; helping teams to manage these resources remotely. More or less anything and everything is now connected to the net. This has put a lot of pressure on the security infrastructure. With the recent war in Europe, Cyber Security vulnerabilities of critical services like energy, communication and financial systems has been exposed. Security threats can never be mitigated completely but its all about how quickly we can catch one and put up a deterrence force. Usually this needs AI , telemetry data and lot of compute to mix these two and take actions. This could be very different for different domains, so one solution fits all would only get you in problem. This space will remain hot for near future. CISO role is becoming more prominent in organisations and so is the security governance model on the digital assets of an organization.
Edge Computing
With companies going global, Cloud computing is quickly becoming the IT backbone of startup’s and big enterprises alike. This helps companies to scale infra to meet global or multi region loads and also adopt new technologies quickly. With this global expension and adoption of cloud, enterprise are getting exposed to a new problem area of frequent round trips for compute and logic to the central cloud or on premise infrastructure, leading to uncalled for poor performance and a scaling nightmare. If enterprises look at their landscape they can find solutions to this problem already deployed in their landscape though for a different problem all together (static content) called a Global CDN. The CDN approach has been quickly adopted for other similar use cases and not so similar use case of IOT. This space is going to grow further with time critical applications which can lead to revenue loss with every single second delay. I can think of Edge Shopping Carts as one such UseCase. This space would grow tremendously in next few years.
AR and VR
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality might sound similar but have a huge difference in what they offer. Augmented reality as the name suggests Augments your physical reality space with digital and makes it interactive in digital space. Usually there are devices and tools to support this activity. This can be really useful in lot of spaces like design, healthcare, hospitality infrastructure Modeling, education (schools , recently saw a organic chemistry bonds AR modler) etc.
Virtual Reality on the other hand is completely simulated experience which could be completely different from the real world Like an immersive video game, virtual education classes Etc. There is a third one with the advent of Metaverse which combines, AR, VR and also XR. This space will grow tremendously in the near future with tools and solutions available at acceptable price points and also the Internet reaching the world with acceptable speed and QoS.
Quantum Computing
The compelxity of problems is ever increasing in digital world due to advancement in technologies, the amount of data produced which can be used to take effective decisions, the speed at which results are required, interests to make mankind an intergalactic specie, this all needs a lot of compute and with the present digital computational poweress this becomes a huge limitation. World is looking for Quantum Computing as a solution for all such problems. Quantum Computing shows endless possibilities and can become a backbone for compute intensive use cases in future and would act as a catalyst in opening new industries as well.
Blockchains
Blockchains became mainstream with bitcoins aka a type of cryptocurrency. Crypto curreinces came into being to remove the central control over the present fiat currencies. The core logic behind blockchains was to remove the central governace, point of failure and improve security. It enables P2P communication instead of a hub and spoke kind of architecture earlier. There are many players in a blockchain ecosystem which are completely distributed. The blockchains work on a simple logic of building a chain of blocks which can contain many transactions or can be a single transactions (though for replicated / public blockchains it makes sense to have multiple transactions / block as it gives some flexibility to replication times across book keeping nodes). The transaction containing/data containing blocks are connected to each other like a chain where a block refers to its previous block with a hash of the data of the previous block ensuring that the data modified in previous blocks can be easily identified once the transactions are committed.
The system is quite resilient and a very good way of implementing different use cases like healthcare, banking, reservations etc. There are a lot of flavours of blockchains which fit into different UseCase. Blockchains as a technology is still in its infancy in adoptions and would get further adoptions with Web3, metaverse and further world moving in more towards self governing systems.
IOT and 5G
5G has enabled new capabilities of the web, with capability of enabling completely new industries and acting as a catalyst for new technologies. It enables more distributed and edge lifestyle which was not possible without compromising connectivity. Metaverse is playing big on the edge connectivity enabled with 5G. With more connectivity, bandwidth at disposal, more data stream can be created leading to further adoption of IOT and Robotic Things. Solution Architects should look for solution and architectural changes to share more rich and personalived content with more accessibility due to 5G, more distributed setup and maybe really lean clients. Multichannel access points. New smart devices would come into being to leverage on the advancement of this connectivity.
Other notable mentions:
Web 3
Cryptocurrencies
Cosmoneural
CRISPR (Gene Editing)