Peering into the future of software development

Now is the best time ever to be a software developer – in terms of employment, organizational impact, and the amazing breadth of tools and platforms available. The future seems even brighter: Over time, I’m betting software development will become the No. 1 technology priority for most enterprises.

That might seem like an overreach, when today’s biggest enterprise technology budget items remain networking, storage, servers, and licensed software. But over the next 10 or 15 years, enterprises will move more and more of their operations to the cloud — and devote more and more resources to building and revising applications on those cloud platforms to differentiate their businesses.

That future is already taking shape on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other clouds, so we’ve launched a fresh InfoWorld Insider blog to chart this progress: New Development, by contributor Simon Bisson, a technology journalist, consultant, and former CTO. As Simon puts it, New Development will examine the “seismic shift” in the way we deliver solutions.

Simon will be covering today’s rich new development stack, from virtual infrastructure such as Docker containers to platform-as-a-service to database-as-a-service to machine learning APIs. He’ll also chronicle the trends wrapped around all that new tech, such as microservices architecture and devops.

Speaking of devops, here’s a related piece of new and useful content: The Devops Digital Spotlight, a joint production of InfoWorld and Network World. In creating this guide, our publications teamed up to examine devops from both an organizational and a technology perspective. If you’re already somewhat familiar with the trend, I suggest going straight to Martin Heller’s excellent article, “Elements of devops,” which breaks down typical dev, test, and deployment processes and explains how all the relevant pieces of the devops technology stack fit together.

From huge corporations to Internet startups, software development on cloud platforms will become increasingly strategic. InfoWorld will stay focused on this dynamic space, not only with Simon’s blog and PDF downloads, but also with features, comparative reviews, and how-to articles. You’ll find a large helping of that stuff on our site today.

To those of you who want to drill deeper or keep up with the frantic pace of change in software development, I’d welcome your suggestions for other innovative ways for InfoWorld to present valuable content. We’ll do our best to deliver.