What’s hot in tech? Reviewing the latest ThoughtWorks Radar

I don’t know how you all keep up with technology nowadays. Has there ever been such a rapid rate of change in fundamental areas? To stay current, one can attend the occasional conference, stay glued to Twitter, or voraciously follow tech sites like The New Stack, InfoQ, and ReadWrite. If you’re overwhelmed with all that’s happening and don’t know what to do, you should check out the twice-yearly ThoughtWorks Radar.  In this post, I’ll take a quick walk through some of the highlights.

The Radar looks at trends in Technologies, Platforms, Tools, and Languages/Frameworks. For each focus area, they categorize things as “adopt”  (use it now), “trial” (try it and make sure it’s a fit for your org), “assess” (explore to understand the impact), and “hold” (don’t touch with a ten foot pole – just kidding).

ThoughtWorks has a pretty good track record of trend spotting, but like anyone, they have some misses. It’s fun to look at their first Radar back in 2010 and see them call Google Wave a “promising platform.” But in the same Radar, they point out things that we now consider standard in any modern organization: continuous deployment, distributed version control systems, and non-relational databases. Not bad!

They summarize the November 2015 Radar with the following trends: Docker incites container ecosystem explosion, microservices and related tools grow in popularity, JavaScript tooling settles down, and security processes get baked into the SDLC. Let’s look at some highlights.

For Techniques, they push for the adoption of items that reflect the new reality of high-performing teams in fast-changing environments. Teams should be generating infrastructure diagrams on demand (versus meticulously crafting schematics that are instantly out of date), treating code deployments different than end-user-facing releases, creating integration contract tests for microservices, and focusing on products over projects. Companies should trial things like creating different backend APIs for each frontend client, using Docker for builds, using idempotency filters to check for duplicates, and doing QA in production. They also push for teams to strongly consider Phoenix environments and stop wasting so much time trying to keep existing environments up to date.ThoughtWorks encourages us to assess the idea of using bug bounties to uncover issues, data lakes for immutable raw data, hosted IDEs (like Codenvy and Cloud9), and reactive architectures. Teams should hold the envy: don’t create microservices or web-scale architectures just because “everyone else is doing it.” ThoughtWorks also tells us to stop adding lots of complex commands to our CI/CD tools, and stop creating standalone DevOps teams.

What Platforms should you know about? Only a single thing ThoughtWorks says to adopt: time-based one-time passwords as two-factor authentication. You’re probably noticing that implemented on more and more popular websites. Lots of things you should trial. These include data-related platforms like CDN-provider Fastly, SQL-on-Hadoop with Cloudera Impala, real-time data processing with Apache Spark and developer-friendly predictive analytics with H2O.  Teams should also take a look at Apache Mesos for container scheduling (among other things) and Amazon Lambda for running short-lived, stateless services. You’ll find some container lovin’ in the assess category. Here you’ll find Amazon’s container service ECS, Deis for a Heroku-like PaaS that can run anywhere, and both Kubernetes and Rancher for container management. From a storage perspective, take a look at time-series databases and Ceph for object storage. Some interesting items to hold on. ThoughtWorks says to favor embedded (web) servers over heavyweight application servers, avoid get roped into overly ambitious API gateway products, and stay away from superficial private clouds that just offer a thin veneer on top of a virtualization platform.

Let’s look at Tools. They, like me, love Postman and think you should adopt it for testing REST (and even SOAP) services. ThoughtWorks suggests a handful of items to trial. Take a deep look at the Docker toolbox for getting Docker up and running on your local machine, Consul for service discovery and health, Git tools for visualizing commands and scanning for sensitive content, and Sensu for a new way of monitoring services based on their role. Teams should assess the messaging tool Kafka, ConcourseCI for CI/CD, Gauge for test automation, Prometheus for monitoring and alerting, RAML as an alternative to Swagger, and the free Visual Studio Code.ThoughtWorks says to cut it out (hold) on Citrix remote desktops for development. Just use cloud IDEs or some other sandboxed environment!

Finally, Languages & Frameworks has a few things to highlight. ThoughtWorks says to adopt ECMAScript 6 for modern JavaScript development, Nancy for HTTP services in .NET, and Swift for Apple development. Teams should trial React.js for JavaScript UI/view development, SignalR for server-to-client (websocket) apps in .NET environments, and Spring Boot for getting powerful Java apps up and running. You should assess tools for helping JavaScript, Haskell, Java and Ruby developers.

Pick a few things from the Radar and dig into them further! Choose things that you’re entirely unfamiliar with, and break into some new, uncomfortable areas. It’s never been a more exciting time for using technology to solve real business problems, and tools like the ThoughtWorks Radar help keep you from falling behind on relevant trends.