Java, Cloud, IoT Trends in 2023
I hope you all had a good start into the new year! 2023 is just a few days old and it is not only time to look at the things that happened in the past year. Here I want to give insights on to the trends which I think Cloud developers should keep an eye on. As my experience mainly lays in the cloud, java and IoT area, this is the part at which I’ll focus on here.
This post just shows my views and I’m pretty sure some of these views will be false or not as important as I think. But let’s give it a try as posts like this are always fun. ;-)
Java
With the faster release of new Java versions, I think we’ll see more pressure to update systems to the newer versions. Long time ago Java was dangling on version 8. With the change of the release cycles and custom JDKs (e.g. Amazon Corretto) Java experiences something like a revival and remains actual - although some developers thought it will slowly die (which I think it will not neither way).
I think Java 17 will be a good point to keep own software updated, because also Spring Boot 3 set the baseline to it!
Looking forward into the future Java will provide virtual threads - a lighter concurrency model. With that I think that frameworks like Vert.x or Helidon will become more popular.
Furthermore we’ll see a faster trend to the usage of native images which gets provided for example by GraalVM. This leads to different advantages like making a runtime redundant, providing faster startup times and faster execution.
Reading tips for that:
IoT
When talking about IoT you cannot hide the fact that 5G gives this a boost in the next years: Devices will be a lot smarter thanks to this technology. Devices will be connected better together providing a mesh of robots.
With 5G you can also operate with bigger data sets. That’s a huge advantage: EdgeComputing will be more important and AI or especially ML (EdgeML) will be more important. Because why should you calculate everything on the cloud when the device can provide you the needed dataset and lower your costs? TensorflowLite acts here as an enabler.
I think in the far future WebAssembly with WASI will be more and more important as this technology provides a better toolbox for running every code in one ecosystem. Another great thing of WebAssembly is that it can replace containers. This means: Code which runs in your VM or K8S Cluster as an container can be ported as a Wasm binary and run directly on the edge!
Another thing is the Web of Things which shall be the standard for an interface to devices. W3 is working on that and Mozilla created WebThings - the platform to manage devices in one place.
To sum it up: The IoT field will make a big shift into an ecosystem of connected, smart devices. But never forget security! That’s also something that will be more important in a way that solutions will be developed.
DevOps
As in the field of IoT I also think that in the field of DevOps WebAssembly (Wasm) will become a player. In the past years most bigger language started to support compilation to Wasm in the past years.
Currently the trend is going towards the support of WASI and providing a runtime for .wasm files (like wasmer or WasmEdge). Docker started this and simulates an image to make Wasm files executable. I think Kubernetes will follow. The next step seems to be the native execution of services.
This leads to the question: Will containers die? Probably not, but if it shall replace this technology, then there’s some work ahead.
Talking about Kubernetes I think that we’ll see a shift to the focus on the core of the application (= business logic). Stuff like authorization, pub/sub messaging and so on will be moved as sidecars or to other runtimes with tools like DAPR. With that the overhead of engineering a secure application in a microservice architecture will be lowered rapidly.
Conclusion
In this post I showed some of the possible trends in the field of Java, IoT and DevOps. Three things are important:
- A shift toward smart connected devices and ecosystems in the field of IoT.
- WebAssembly and native execution will get more and more important.
- Simpler engineering and more focus on business logic in Microservice architectures.
We’ll see if I’m wrong or not. So far, have a good start into the year 2023!