Technology Trends for 2022

2021 is a year of continuous technological development, with new technologies emerging one after another. From the mobile era to cloud computing big data, and then to artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud native and etc. All of these technologies are gradually known to people. Technology changed day by day but the fundamental things apply. Many core technologies still play the leading roles. The arrival of new technologies not only injects fresh blood, but also promotes the continuous updating of core technologies.

On January 25, 2022, O'Reilly released the report of Technology Trends for 2022, which provides a comprehensive analysis of technology development. It counts data from January 2021 to September 2021 and compares data with the same period in 2020. It covers hot topics such as microservices, cloud services, web frameworks, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, machine learning, databases, virtual reality, augmented reality, and the metaverse.

The report is based on four types of data, including search queries, questions asked to O’ Reilly Answers, resource usage by title, and resource usage by topic. The content that has not been collected on the platform (such as QUIC protocol or HTTP/3) is not included in the report.

Data has become the most frequently searched word, and it may continue to dominate in 2022

As an intelligent search engine, O'Reilly Answers allows users to search for a specific question or find example questions in the question bank. This report counts all the words that appear in O'Reilly Answers, and the results show that the five words that appear most frequently are "data", "Python", "Git", "test" and "Java"; while the most frequently searched questions are "What is dynamic programming?" and "How to write good unit tests?".

From this we can conclude that data is still one of the top topics for developers. The most common word pair associated with data is "data governance" followed by "data science", but "Data analysis" and "Data engineering" ranked lower. It shows that "data governance" will be the focus of research in the data field.

In the past statistics, Python and Java were the top two programming languages, and the same is true this year. The difference is that searches for Python and Java have dropped, while Rust and Go have grown rapidly. Besides, ''programming'' is one of the most commonly used keywords. Kubernetes takes third place, followed by Golang and Rust. The frequency of questions about Kubernetes reflects the interest in container orchestration.

In addition, "AWS", "Azure" and "cloud" are also very frequently searched terms, which indicates that developers are very concerned about the development of cloud platforms. The frequency of GCP Google Cloud is also in the top 3% of the list.

Terms related to cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and etc.) are still in the top 20% in frequency, but the rankings have slipped down.

Network security has become the focus of enterprises. What breakthroughs will be made this year?

In 2021, the security of major infrastructures, hospitals, and enterprises was threatened like never before due to ransomware attacks. According to the O'Reilly research, 6% of respondents' companies have been attacked. On July 6, 2021, US software vendor Kaseya was attacked, and thousands of customers were affected by the attack. The company's CEO Fred Voccola said the attackers demanded a ransom of up to $70 million.

According to O’Reilly research, there has been a significant increase in security-related content on websites from the beginning of the year, with a 270% increase in ransomware-related content, and a 90% increase in privacy-related content at the same time. In addition, content related to application software security, malware, threats, etc. has increased to varying degrees.

In addition, articles with the words "security" or "cybersecurity" in the title increased by 17% and 24%, respectively. Although the growth of these keywords is slow compared to the above, the frequency of mentions of "security" is far ahead of all other terms in total.

Source: O'Reilly

Software architecture, Kubernetes and microservices mentioned most often

Software development is a large category in O'Reilly that covers many things, such as programming languages, cloud, architecture, and more. The data shows that software architecture, Kubernetes, and microservices are the three most mentioned topics in 2021, with year-over-year growth of 19%, 15%, and 13%, respectively. Although the growth in these three figures pales in comparison to growth trends in topics such as API Gateway (up 218%), it reflects a pattern: smaller themes tend to grow more clearly, while already dominant themes grow more slowly. API gateway content gets roughly 1/250 as many units viewed as content on architecture or Kubernetes does.

However, despite the relatively small number of API gateways, the 218% increase was still a surprise. The same is true for the 54% growth gained by Cloud Native. Enterprises are investing heavily in Kubernetes and microservices today, and they are building cloud-native applications with cloud services, and API gateways are an important tool for routing requests between clients and services.

In this case, it is no coincidence that the significant increase in content mentions of containers (137%), and containers are the best way to package applications and services. Despite the difficulty of migrating applications to containers and managing them with tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem, a few years ago, enterprise applications were limited to running on a handful of servers and managed only by humans. Today, however, many enterprises are scaling up, with thousands of servers and hundreds of services. This is all thanks to the evolution of cloud technology.

When it comes to microservices, we have to mention distributed systems. Content about distributed systems has grown by 39% over the past year, with a corresponding increase of complex systems and complexity (157% and 8%). It’s also worth noting that design patterns that were unpopular a few years ago are making a comeback and seeing a 19% increase.

Quantum computing remains an interesting topic, with a 39% year-over-year increase despite fewer views. This is a very good result for a technology that has not yet succeeded. Although there have been breakthroughs in quantum computers, it will take quite a bit of time to build a quantum computer that can do jobs. Once the quantum computer arrives, it is bound to bring about new changes.

In addition, software architecture also plays an important role. We can't rebuild legacy applications or use cloud technology or use microservices etc. Software architecture can help maintain inflexible legacy applications and keep them updated as requirements change. So it is not surprising that mentions of software architecture are increasing.