APIs as products in their own right, serverless architectures, and "legacy in a box" are the trends shaping IT management this year, according to ThoughtWorks' annual report on emerging technologies.
The report covered a host of techniques, languages, frameworks, tools and platforms. I had the opportunity to get more perspective from Mike Mason, global head of technology at ThoughtWorks, who porvided his take on where the enterprise development world.
Machine learning is having a huge impact on enterprise sites, Mason says. "Machine learning is taking off because of a nexus of forces. First, the big data hype over the last few years means organizations are sitting on larger piles of data because they've been taught it might be valuable and they shouldn't throw it away. This data provides the foundation for useful machine learning." There has also been what Mason calls "a democratization of the algorithms. Google released TensorFlow as open-source, so now anyone can build a machine learning model, train it using the cloud or a GPU farm, and execute it at speed on a user's mobile phone."
However, Mason continues, don't expect to see machine learning helping developers in their own work anytime soon. "There have been many attempts at higher-order languages, where human developers simply explain their intent, and machine learning or AI conjures up implementation code. Practical usage of these techniques are a long way off."
At the same time, Mason points to "other development problems that are difficult but may be improved through machine learning." For example, he illustrates, "wrestling an existing suite of enterprise systems -- we have highly complex interactions between systems and components, complex data access patterns and relationships, and so on. Instrumenting these systems and then applying machine learning might yield insight that could allow us to do enterprise architecture better -- 'this system is a hot spot,' 'this system doesn't seem to be used much,' 'these two systems always behave in a related fashion, maybe they should be one system,' and so on."
A somewhat surprising absence from the ThoughtWorks report is the word "cloud," which is only mentioned a few times, though it's seen as the computing method everyone is adopting going forward. That's because it's now everywhere and everything, Mason points out.
