InfoQ Developer Marketing Newsletter (Quarterly)

Key Software Trends of the Year; AI-Era Insights for Architects; Java State of the Union; Top Webinars and Content of 2025

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:25:21 GMT

InfoQ is excited to announce QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2), a two-day conference focused on how senior software leaders embed AI across the lifecycle to build secure, resilient, and innovative enterprise systems at scale.

Exhibitor and sponsored speaking slots are available. Email sales@boston.qcon.ai for more details.

The InfoQ Trends Reports 2025 eMag

As a B2B marketer, it’s important to stay abreast of the ever-evolving technology landscape, software development trends, and organizational practices. The 2025 InfoQ Trends Reports eMag not only highlights key software trends from the past year, it also provides a lens through which you can plan your 2026 marketing and product roadmaps.

Gain insights into AI’s impact on software delivery, the growing importance of sociotechnical systems, evolving cloud realities, and what 2026 may bring.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

Java State of the Union: InfoQ Trends Report December 2025

The InfoQ December 2025 Java Trends Report highlights key shifts in the Java ecosystem for 2026.

AI on the JVM is gaining momentum, with frameworks like Embabel, Koog, Spring AI, and LangChain4j accelerating AI-native and AI-assisted development in Java. Java 25 sets a modern LTS baseline, improving readability, concurrency, and performance, as frameworks increasingly standardize on Java 17+.

Modernization is surging as organizations update legacy applications, with OpenRewrite becoming the dominant automation tool. Enterprise Java continues to advance through broad adoption of Jakarta EE 11 and early progress on Jakarta EE 12, while community engagement grows and enterprises explore more hybrid, regional, and on-prem deployment models.

Read the full report

20th Anniversary: QCon London 2026 (March 16-18); Sponsorships Still Available

Entering its 20th year, QCon London is the perennial conference for senior software engineers, architects, and technical team leads to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation in the software industry.

Some of this year’s QCon London track themes include:

Architecture in the Age of AI, hosted by Fabiane Nardon, Java Champion & Data Platform Director @totvs
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture", Java Champion, and InfoQ News Manager
AI Engineering, hosted by Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager at Zoox & Author of ‘MLOps with Ray’
Debugging Distributed Systems, hosted by Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow at honeycomb.io, Developer Advocate
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures, hosted by Sid Anand, Fellow, Cloud & Data Platform at Walmart, Apache Airflow Committer/PMC, Ex-Netflix, LinkedIn, eBay, Etsy, & PayPal
Software Security & Risk Management, hosted by Chris Swan, Engineer at atsigncompany

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available for QCon London 2026. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Next-Gen Architecture Playbook: AI-Era Insights for Modern Architects

InfoQ has partnered with renowned book author Shweta Vohra to create an exclusive InfoQ eMag and five-part article series, “Next-Gen Architecture Playbook: Insights & Patterns for the AI Era,” which will explore how today’s architects are rethinking system design, platforms, APIs, and delivery in an AI-driven world.

Sponsorship is now open for the eMag and article series - publishing late Q1/early Q2- offering a lead-gen and brand awareness program aligned with a high-value topic shaping modern software architecture.

Email sales@c4media.com for more details.

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2025

To help you gauge what software development leaders have been thinking about and reading over the past year, we’ve assembled a list of Top 10 Content published on InfoQ in 2025, based on page views:

What’s Next for AI; Dev Advocacy Insights; QCon London 2026

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:58:44 GMT

InfoQ is delighted to announce a new two-day conference, QCon AI New York City, taking place December 16-17, 2025. This new event is designed to help organizations move beyond the hype and learn how leading engineering teams run AI in production—reliably, securely, at scale.

Exhibitor slots are still available. Email sales@qcon.ai for more details.

Top AI Trends for 2025: What B2B Marketers Need to Know

InfoQ’s 2025 AI Trends Report identifies Physical AI as the next frontier, moving AI from digital tasks into the real world, while Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) sees widespread enterprise adoption.

AI is shifting from assistant to co-creator, with entire applications developed, tested, and deployed alongside AI. AI-driven DevOps is automating coding, deployment, and operations.

Human-centered design is key. Standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) improve interoperability, but AI must align with real human needs to enhance daily life and work.

This report offers key insights to help B2B marketers align messaging with evolving technical priorities.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

QCon London 2026 (March 16-18) -Track Topics Confirmed

Some of next year’s QCon London track themes include:

AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
Modern Data Architectures
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures
Resilient Engineering Practices for Security Against Modern Threats

See the complete list or provisional topics

Sponsorships are still available for QCon London 2026. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Case Studies

Developer Advocacy: Building Trust, Measuring Impact, and Adapting to AI

Developer advocacy has grown from a community movement into a strategic role bridging engineering, product, and marketing. InfoQ spoke with Mary Thengvall about measuring impact, scaling engagement authentically, and how AI is reshaping developer learning and tools.

Read the full case study

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q3 2025

To help you gauge what software development leaders have been thinking about and reading over the past three months, we’ve assembled a list of Top 10 Content published on InfoQ in Q3 2025, based on page views:

Developer Advocacy: Building Trust, Measuring Impact, and Adapting to AI

InfoQ — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:25:43 GMT

Developer advocacy has evolved from a grassroots community movement into a strategic discipline that sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and marketing. But as organizations mature, many advocates still wrestle with fundamental questions: How do you measure impact? How do you scale community engagement without losing authenticity? And how will AI reshape how developers learn and adopt new tools?

InfoQ recently sat down with Mary Thengvall, a longtime practitioner and leader in developer relations and program management, to unpack these questions. Our conversation explored how advocacy has changed over the years, the balance between storytelling and metrics, and the new challenges AI introduces for both content and community.

The Accidental Advocate

Like many in DevRel, Mary didn’t start there intentionally.

“It wasn’t really a defined role when I began,” she recalls. “I was working at O’Reilly Media, asking questions like: Are we producing the right content? Are our conferences addressing what people actually need?”

Those questions evolved into what became the company’s first structured approach to community management—long before “DevRel” was a common title.

“I started by simply asking developers what they wanted to learn, what trends they were following, and what resources actually helped them. That curiosity—listening to the audience and responding with useful resources—became the foundation for everything that followed.”

Even now, in a program management role, that same mindset drives her work.

“Whether it’s building or managing strategic projects, the goal is the same: make sure people have what they need to succeed.”

Journalism, Empathy, and Product Thinking

Before tech, Mary studied journalism—something she credits with shaping her approach to advocacy.

“Journalism trains you to ask why people care about something, to find the human angle. That translates perfectly into developer relations. You’re still telling stories—but in a way that helps people solve problems.”

That empathy and curiosity also mirror product management principles: deeply understanding the user and their “jobs to be done.”

“If you can understand the human behind the code—their frustrations, motivations, and goals—you’ll always create better products and better content.”

Measuring Success Without Losing the Plot

DevRel’s toughest question is still: How do you measure success?

“It depends on what the company needs,” Mary says. “Early-stage teams might care about reach and awareness. Mature organizations focus more on retention, adoption, or reducing support load. There isn’t one metric—it’s about aligning to the company’s priorities at that moment.”

The hardest part, she adds, is resisting vanity metrics.

“A tutorial that addresses a common forum question might result in fewer questions about that feature, but can you prove causation? Usually not. We often deal with correlation, and that’s okay. What matters is that your work clearly supports business and user goals.”

That nuance, she says, is what often gets lost when DevRel is treated purely as a marketing function.

“When the focus shifts to traffic or impressions, you risk missing the point. Developer relations isn’t about noise—it’s about trust and sustained engagement.”

Marketing Goals vs. Developer Trust

Balancing authenticity with organizational goals remains a recurring challenge.

“Sales and marketing teams often focus on decision-makers, while DevRel speaks to practitioners—the people actually using the tools,” Mary explains. “I like to frame it as accounts versus individuals. Marketing targets accounts; DevRel supports individuals. Both are valuable, but the mindset is very different.”

Developers are quick to detect inauthenticity, so maintaining that distinction is essential.

“You build credibility by being useful. If the content genuinely helps developers solve a problem, they’ll remember that far more than a campaign slogan.”

Building Scalable, Authentic Content

When asked what types of content have proven most effective, Mary emphasizes diversity and reuse.

“People learn differently—some prefer videos, others prefer tutorials or live demos. I like creating what I call a content kit: start with a demo or sample app, document it, write a tutorial, record a walkthrough, maybe turn it into a talk or a podcast. You’re repurposing a single project into multiple formats.”

This approach expands reach without burning out the team.

“We measured what we could control. Our goal wasn’t always to publish—sometimes it was just to produce a content kit and hand it off to the team responsible for publishing. That kept expectations realistic while still showing progress.”

Lessons from Community Building

Community management is often the most rewarding—and the most difficult—part of developer advocacy.

“At Camunda, we ran both a Slack community and a Discourse forum. Slack was great early on—fast feedback, strong engagement—but as the community grew, it became unsustainable. The same questions came up repeatedly, and the answers weren’t searchable.”

The team made the difficult decision to shut down Slack and focus on Discourse.

“Engineers loved Slack because it felt personal. But long-term, a searchable, open forum was better for accessibility and sustainability. It wasn’t a popular decision, but it was the right one.”

That experience reinforced an important truth: sometimes the healthiest community decisions are the least popular ones.

“You can’t please everyone, but you can prioritize transparency and accessibility. That’s what lasts.”

Reporting Lines and Cross-Team Collaboration

For DevRel to be effective, it has to bridge multiple functions—engineering, product, marketing, and sales.

“I reported to the CTO, which gave me direct visibility into product discussions—roadmaps, feature trade-offs, customer pain points. That made it easier to anticipate questions from users and feed insights back to the team.”

At the same time, she stayed in sync with marketing and customer success to ensure alignment on messaging and outcomes.

“DevRel really sits at the hub of all those spokes. You have to build trust internally, not just externally.”

AI as an Assistant, Not a Replacement

With generative AI accelerating technical content creation, we discussed its role in DevRel.

“AI is amazing for overcoming ‘blank page syndrome,’” Mary says. “I’ll often use ChatGPT to draft an outline, summarize documentation, or generate a checklist. But you still need a human in the loop to verify accuracy and context.”

She once used AI to condense complex migration documentation into a concise checklist—then had engineers review it for correctness.

“It saved time, but it didn’t replace expertise.”

The Future of Discovery and API Adoption

Developers are already using AI tools to interact with documentation and troubleshoot APIs. Mary believes this trend will reshape how teams think about discoverability.

“It’s a bit like SEO. AI assistants pull from what’s already well-structured and visible online. So if your docs and examples are clean, discoverable, and current, your product will show up in those answers.”

Right now, though, she sees AI affecting how developers learn more than where they learn.

“People might skip the forum and just ask an LLM—but that LLM is still pulling from those forums. The consumption pattern changes, but the underlying knowledge sources don’t—at least not yet.”

What Makes a Great API Experience

When it comes to adoption, Mary believes the fundamentals haven’t changed.

“A great API is intuitive. It gets developers to value quickly and minimizes confusion. Every additional question—‘What does this parameter mean?’ ‘Why isn’t this call working?’—adds friction.”

The best developer experiences, she says, prioritize simplicity and fast feedback loops.

“Clear documentation, quick-start guides, sample apps—those are still the biggest levers. Anything that shortens time-to-value increases trust and retention.”

Avoiding an AI Echo Chamber

Looking ahead, Mary sees both promise and peril in how AI will shape developer marketing and content.

“The risk is that we stop creating new ideas. These models learn from the past, so if we’re not careful, we’ll just keep remixing what’s already out there.”

The real opportunity, she says, lies in pairing AI efficiency with human originality.

“The people who thrive will be the ones who use AI to accelerate workflows—but still bring their own insight, creativity, and lived experience. That’s what will set future content apart.”

Transitioning from DevRel to Program Management

Today, Mary is a program manager for strategic projects at Camunda, coordinating cross-functional initiatives across the company.

“It’s less about direct advocacy and more about ensuring teams have the resources and feedback loops they need,” she explains. “But the mindset is the same—help people succeed, remove friction, and communicate clearly.”

That through-line—from journalism to community management to program leadership—reflects what might be DevRel’s greatest lesson: the importance of curiosity and empathy in every technical discipline.

“At its core, developer relations is about listening and connecting. Whether you’re writing code, managing programs, or creating content, that human focus never really changes.”

How QCon Attracts Decision Makers

InfoQ — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:21:24 GMT

“QCon stood out as the best of many worlds. It has a very strong attendee base of people who return year after year because it matters to them—people who come back to learn. It has a strong developer focus, with most attendees being senior-level developers who can make decisions about the technology they actually use, yet remain open-minded because they’re here to learn. That means you get people who are committed to taking something valuable away, rather than just saying, ‘I attended because I got a ticket.’

At QCon, we meet people tackling complicated problems and working at larger scales. The key thing is that you get a technically deep, outcome-focused crowd. To be honest, QCon was a shaping experience for me. When I was a junior developer, I watched the talks online and learned from some of the greats in the industry. As I moved up and began running DevRel teams, QCon was the first event I actively decided to sponsor because of how valuable it had been to me as an engineer, and how much it could contribute to building out my teams and my career.”

– Ben Gamble, Field CTO, Ververica

How QCon Connects You with Enterprise Organizations

InfoQ — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:13:27 GMT

“Yeah, I think ING has such a strong technology DNA, characteristic, and brand that we need to be in places like this to make it clear that we’re committed to this community, to these subjects, and that we are truly an active part of the tech sector—especially the deep engineering side of it. This is a conference that is profoundly technical in depth. I don’t see many vendors here trying to sell pie in the sky. I don’t see many people talking about things they don’t actually do themselves. That’s invaluable, because you get real, hands-on experience here. If I had to describe QCon in a single word, it would probably be ‘innovative.’”
– Daniele Tonella, CTO, ING

How QCon Delivers Quality Leads from Decision Makers

InfoQ — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:53:00 GMT

“Our company's name is Akka, and we specialize in building software that enables organizations to build systems at scale. I’ve noticed that at QCon, there are a lot of architects and IT decision-makers focused on how to design and build systems—and that’s right in our purview. Our ideal customer is a Fortune 1,000 or Fortune 5,000 company, and someone who understands they may need assistance solving challenging problems and is interested in approaching them from the right perspective. QCon brings together exactly that type of person. I would highly encourage you to become a QCon sponsor. I think the investment is worth it. At QCon, we consistently get both quantity and quality—large numbers of leads, with the vast majority being highly qualified.” – Duncan DeVore, Sr. Director, Architect, and AI Advocate, Akka

Top Software Architecture Trends; New AI Engineering eMags; Akka’s Demand Gen Breakthrough; QConSF 2025 Tracks Confirmed

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 17:59:25 GMT

Exhibitor and sponsored speaking slots are available. Email sales@qcon.ai for more details.

Top Trends in Software Architecture for 2025: What B2B Marketers Need to Know

InfoQ’s Software Architecture and Design Trends Report – 2025 highlights what senior architects and technical leaders are focusing on this year. Innovation is shifting from large language models to smaller, finely-tuned models and agentic AI. RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) is becoming a common design consideration, and architects are assessing the impact of AI-assisted tools on both professional and citizen developers.

Sustainability efforts continue, with cloud cost reduction used as a proxy for efficiency, though renewable energy use remains complex. Teams are also adopting decentralized decision-making to reduce architectural bottlenecks.

This report offers key insights to help B2B marketers align messaging with evolving technical priorities.

Read the full report

New eMags Available for Sponsorship: Rise of the AI Engineer, Architecting for Data Sovereignty, and Team Dynamics

InfoQ eMags are professionally designed, downloadable collections of popular InfoQ articles covering the latest software development technologies, trends, and topics.

As a sponsor, you get a one page sponsored article placement within the eMag along with a minimum of 300 world-wide leads generated via your opt-in message.

The following eMags - slated to publish in Q4 2025 and early 2026 - are currently available for sponsorship:

AI-Assisted Development
Security and AI
The Rise of the AI Engineer
Architecture Through Different Lenses 2025
Architecting for Data Sovereignty
Team & Organizational Dynamics

Email sales@c4media.com to learn more about available eMag sponsorships.

QCon San Francisco 2025 (November 17-19) -Track Topics and Hosts Confirmed

Entering its 19th year, QCon San Francisco is the perennial conference for senior software engineers, architects, and technical team leads to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation in the software industry.

Some of this year’s QConSF tracks include:

AI Engineering that Delivers: Blueprint to Impact, hosted by Faye Zhang, Staff Software Engineer @Pinterest
Navigating Major Architecture Migrations, hosted by Janani Narayanan, Applied ML Engineer @Uber
Driving Reliability Through Modern Platform Engineering and Dev Enablement, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture,” Java Champion
Architecting for Efficiency: Performance, Cost, and Maintainability, hosted by Vidhya Arvind, Tech Lead @Netflix
The Stories Behind the Incidents, hosted by Lorin Hochstein, Staff Software Engineer @Airbnb

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available for QCon San Francisco 2025. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Case Studies

Architecting Trust: Akka’s Demand Gen Breakthrough with InfoQ and O’Reilly

To introduce a complex new architectural concept and build brand credibility with software architects, the Akka team partnered with O'Reilly Media and InfoQ. The campaign combined O'Reilly’s technical depth with InfoQ’s reach to drive awareness, generate qualified leads, and grow long-term pipeline.

Read the full case study

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q2 2025

Architecting Trust: Akka’s Demand Gen Breakthrough with InfoQ and O’Reilly

InfoQ — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:54:48 GMT

Overview

To introduce a complex new architectural concept and strengthen its brand with software architects, the Akka team turned to two of the most trusted names in developer education and media: O'Reilly Media and InfoQ. Through a coordinated campaign that blended O'Reilly’s deep technical content with InfoQ’s reach and reputation among senior software decision-makers, Akka successfully drove awareness, qualified leads, and long-term pipeline growth.

The Challenge

Akka needed a way to educate a highly technical audience—application architects—about a new architectural paradigm. This required content that was both deeply technical and vendor-neutral, presented in a format and on platforms that this audience respects and trusts.

The Solution

Akka partnered with O’Reilly Media to develop high-quality, long-form assets including a technical guide and a live webinar. These materials were then strategically promoted across the InfoQ network, leveraging its highly targeted audience of senior software professionals.

The strategy included:

Sponsoring the O’Reilly Software Architecture Superstream, which garnered over 3,000 registrants and 600+ live attendees.
Promoting the O’Reilly-authored content through InfoQ direct email campaigns, on-site placements, and retargeting ads, generating over 2,700 leads and counting
Sponsoring topically-related InfoQ webinars - which include a practitioner-led Q&A - generating over 1,200 registrants
Using a mix of gated and ungated distribution, ensuring both broad awareness and lead capture.

The Results

High-quality leads: The campaigns reached precisely the audience Akka was targeting—application architects who recognize and trust both the O’Reilly and InfoQ brands.
Pipeline influence: While attribution is shared, Akka confidently reports that these campaigns contributed to both new business and upsell opportunities.
Content longevity: While webinars were typically used for one quarter, detailed reports remained relevant for up to a year, maximizing ROI.
Brand credibility: O’Reilly’s reputation for unbiased, real-world technical content paired seamlessly with InfoQ’s reach to reinforce Akka’s credibility.

Why InfoQ + O'Reilly?

O’Reilly content is known for its depth, neutrality, and relevance—traits that resonate with technical audiences.
InfoQ’s platform amplifies that content to a highly curated audience, ensuring it reaches the right people at the right time.

Key Takeaways

Combining InfoQ and O’Reilly creates a powerful marketing engine for technical products.
Content must be high-value and vendor-neutral to resonate with senior developers and architects.
Shared attribution is the right mindset: no single asset or campaign closes a deal, but their cumulative effect is significant.
Flexibility and long-term planning allow for smarter use of budgets—choosing when to invest more in content creation vs. promotion.

“InfoQ and O’Reilly are as good as peanut butter and jelly for software architects.” — Darin, Akka Marketing Team

Supercharge Your Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

Looking to connect with senior software engineers, architects, and decision-makers? Discover how O’Reilly’s expert content creation and InfoQ’s highly engaged technical audience can help you drive brand awareness and maximize demand generation.

Let’s talk! Connect with Sharon Cordesse (scordesse@oreilly.com) and Bethany Vananda (Bethany.Vananda@c4media.com) to explore how this partnership can elevate your marketing strategy. Schedule a time to chat today!

InfoQ 2025 Technology Adoption Report; DoIT Demand Gen Case Study; QConSF '25 Tracks Announced; Top 10 Content

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:28:16 GMT

Exhibitor and sponsored speaking slots are available. Email sales@qcon.ai for more details.

The InfoQ 2025 Technology Adoption Report

The latest InfoQ Technology Adoption Report reveals several recurring technical challenges that are top of mind for senior software engineers, architects, and technical leaders in 2025. Based on insights from 191 survey respondents, the report spotlights key themes shaping the landscape — including legacy modernization, technical debt, AI integration, scalability, and cost management.

While cloud-based AI platforms are becoming the norm, many teams still struggle with the skills, tools, and processes needed to make AI work in the real world. Core cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices are widely adopted, but newer, more complex tools are seeing slower uptake. Across the board, teams are balancing the need to innovate quickly with the realities of cost control, system complexity, and a constant need to learn and adapt.

Read the full report

QCon San Francisco 2025 (November 17-19) -Track Topics Announced

Some of this year’s QConSF track themes include:

Generative AI in Production & Advancements
Getting Started in Machine Learning
Modern Data Architectures
Architectural Evolution
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available for QCon San Francisco 2025. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Case Studies

Maximizing Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

DoiT, a cloud optimization and engineering solutions provider, sought to enhance its demand generation efforts by leveraging high-value technical content. Partnering with O’Reilly and distributing content through InfoQ enabled DoiT to attract highly qualified leads, engage senior software influencers, and position itself as a thought leader in the industry.

Read the full case study

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q1 2025

InfoQ 2025 Technology Adoption Survey Results

InfoQ — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:17:06 GMT

*Total survey respondents = 191

Key Technical Challenges Faced by Software Practitioners in 2025

The latest InfoQ reader survey reveals several recurring technical challenges that are top of mind for senior software engineers, architects, and technical leaders in 2025. Across 191 survey respondents, a few clear themes emerge—legacy modernization, technical debt, AI integration, scalability, and cost management dominate the landscape.

1. Legacy Systems & Technical Debt - The most frequently cited challenge is the burden of legacy systems, often intertwined with technical debt. Respondents highlight difficulties in maintaining aging codebases while simultaneously adopting modern frameworks, tools, and architectures. Many are caught in a cycle of delivering new features while lacking the time or resources to refactor or retire outdated systems. This tension is exacerbated when legacy architectures create bottlenecks or architectural inconsistencies that hinder scaling, deployment speed, and integration with modern services.

2. AI Integration & Adopting AI — especially Generative AI — is both a promising opportunity and a growing pain point. Practitioners report challenges in integrating AI/ML into existing workflows, managing AI/ML model accuracy and training, and understanding the actual ROI of AI initiatives. Others express concerns about keeping up with the fast pace of AI advancements, upskilling their teams, and avoiding hype-driven decision-making. The application of GenAI across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is still experimental for many, and organizational alignment around it remains immature.

3. Scalability, Reliability & Complexity - Engineering teams are increasingly grappling with the scalability and reliability of distributed systems, often in the context of cloud-native and microservices architectures. These concerns extend to observability, deployment reliability, and the management of cross-team dependencies. As applications become more modular and interconnected, ensuring fault tolerance, consistent system performance, and coherent team collaboration is an escalating challenge.

4.Cloud Complexity and Cloud costs, infrastructure sprawl, and cost optimization are major concerns. Teams are balancing the need for speed and flexibility with the pressure to control operational expenses. Respondents frequently mention the difficulty of managing multi-cloud environments, monitoring cloud spend, and implementing effective FinOps practices.

5. Skill Gaps and Organizational Alignment - Beyond technical hurdles, many cite lack of skilled developers, internal silos, and misalignment between business and engineering as barriers to success. Upskilling, retaining talent, and maintaining high-quality developer experience were also prominent challenges—especially in relation to newer tech like AI and evolving cloud platforms.

Key Challenges in AI/ML Adoption

Organizations face a range of barriers when adopting and operationalizing AI/ML technologies, with skills shortages standing out as the top challenge. Nearly half (48%) of respondents cited a lack of skilled AI/ML professionals as their primary hurdle. This highlights an ongoing talent gap that continues to limit organizations' ability to scale AI efforts.

Another major obstacle is the difficulty in measuring and demonstrating ROI from AI/ML initiatives, selected by 38% of respondents. This suggests that while many companies are experimenting with AI/ML, proving its business value remains elusive, potentially slowing down broader investment and adoption.

Additional significant challenges include:

Integration complexity: 35% report struggles with embedding AI/ML into existing systems and workflows, reflecting technical and organizational silos.
Pace of change: 32% say that keeping up with evolving technologies is a persistent issue, underlining the rapid innovation cycles within AI/ML ecosystems.
Data hurdles: 30% identify difficulties with obtaining and preparing high-quality training data, and another 30% point to the high costs of infrastructure and tooling.

Managing model performance in production (29%) and addressing ethical concerns and bias (18%) were noted but ranked lower compared to operational and technical barriers, suggesting that while ethics is recognized, immediate practical concerns dominate current adoption efforts.

Interestingly, 10% of respondents indicated that none of these challenges significantly affect their organizations, hinting at either higher maturity levels or more limited AI/ML initiatives.

Overall, the survey reveals that successful AI/ML adoption is as much a people and process challenge as it is a technical one. Organizations aiming to lead in AI will need to invest in skills development, ROI measurement frameworks, and modernizing infrastructure to overcome these barriers.

AI Infrastructure Priorities for 2025

Survey data reveals strong momentum toward cloud-based AI adoption across organizations:

Cloud-based AI platforms (59%) such as AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, and Azure ML are the top priority, establishing the cloud as the foundation for AI development and deployment.

AI development environments like Jupyter Notebooks and AI-enhanced IDEs (46%) are also widely used, supporting experimentation and model iteration.

Adoption is more measured for hybrid and on-premises approaches:

20% plan to implement hybrid AI infrastructure, combining cloud and on-prem solutions—indicating a need for flexibility in data governance and performance.

On-premises AI infrastructure (17%) and AI model hosting platforms (20%) are less common, suggesting more targeted or advanced use cases.

Edge AI adoption remains limited (7%), with only niche applications driving current interest.

Notably, 13% of respondents report no plans to adopt AI infrastructure in 2025—reflecting either organizational constraints or a wait-and-see approach.

Key Insight: Cloud-native AI platforms and development tools are becoming the default, while hybrid, on-premises, and edge deployments remain specialized strategies driven by specific operational or regulatory needs.

Cloud-Native Technology Adoption

Survey respondents indicated strong adoption of foundational cloud-native technologies across their organizations:

Containerization (87%), microservices (81%), and infrastructure as code (70%) are firmly established as standard practices.
Kubernetes is widely adopted (68%), though 21% of respondents do not plan to use it—signaling potential complexity or suitability concerns.
Serverless computing (61%) and event-driven architectures (72%) are gaining traction, reflecting demand for scalable and loosely coupled systems.

Adoption is more cautious for advanced or specialized technologies:

Only 29% currently use service mesh, with over half (52%) not planning to adopt—highlighting complexity as a likely barrier.
Cloud-native continuous delivery tools (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux) are in use by 50%, with another 19% planning to adopt—pointing to growing momentum behind GitOps practices.

Key Insight: Core cloud-native patterns are now mainstream, while more complex components like service mesh and CD tools are still emerging, with adoption driven by organizational maturity and operational readiness.

Top Architectural Challenges in Modern Systems

Survey data highlights the top architectural challenges technical leaders are facing today:

Managing complexity is the most critical concern:
Managing dependencies and reducing coupling in complex systems was selected by 54% of respondents, making it the most cited challenge.

Design trade-offs between scalability and simplicity are a major focus:
50% reported difficulty balancing simplicity with scalability, and another 50% emphasized aligning architecture decisions with business goals and timelines.

Adaptability and modernization are ongoing priorities:
41% are focused on maintaining flexibility for future changes and technology adoption, while 38% are transitioning from monolithic systems to microservices or other modern architectures.
Integration of legacy systems remains a notable hurdle for 37%.

Operational resilience and cloud strategy are secondary concerns:
Ensuring high availability and reliability was cited by 27%, while designing for multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments lags behind at 17%.

Key Insight:
Architectural leaders are primarily grappling with managing system complexity, making pragmatic design decisions, and future-proofing their systems—while operational and multi-cloud challenges, though important, are comparatively lower priorities.

Challenges in Managing Databases and Data Engineering Efforts

Survey respondents highlighted the following concerns and challenges associated with managing databases:

The top concern is managing costs for storage and database infrastructure (62%), followed closely by optimizing query performance and reducing latency (55%).
Ensuring data consistency and accuracy across distributed systems (42%) and integrating and maintaining data pipelines across diverse systems (40%) reflect the complexity of operating in modern, multi-environment architectures.
Scaling databases to handle increasing data volume and user traffic (36%) and adopting and scaling new technologies like AI/ML for data processing (36%) are also prominent challenges.
Ensuring robust data security and preventing breaches was selected by 34% of respondents.

Overall, the data shows that organizations are balancing cost management, performance optimization, system complexity, and technology adoption as they scale their data operations.

Database and Data Engineering Technology Adoption

On the database adoption front, InfoQ survey respondents showed strong current usage of foundational technologies, with growing interest in emerging solutions.

Key-Value Stores (e.g., Redis, Amazon DynamoDB) are the most widely used, with 76% currently using them. An additional 7% plan to adopt within the next 12 months.
NoSQL Databases (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB) show similarly high adoption, with 72% currently using and another 7% planning to adopt in the next year.
Streaming Data Platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka) are currently used by 60%, with 10% planning to adopt within 12 months and 5% beyond that.
Cloud-Native Databases (e.g., Amazon Aurora, Google Spanner) are currently used by 59%, with 7% looking to adopt within the next year.
Data Analytics Platforms (e.g., Databricks, Apache Spark, Tableau) are used by 57% today, and show the highest short-term growth potential, with 13% planning adoption within 12 months and 7% beyond.

In contrast, several specialized database types show significantly lower current adoption but are gaining attention:

Document-Oriented Databases are used by 26%, with 15% planning adoption in the future.
Graph Databases are used by only 21%, but 11% plan to adopt within 12 months and 8% beyond.
Vector Databases, a newer category (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate), have 19% current usage, with 14% planning near-term adoption—highlighting early momentum in support of AI/ML workloads.

Overall, the data suggests continued investment in established platforms alongside growing interest in technologies enabling real-time processing, AI/ML, and advanced analytics.

Challenges in Delivering High-Quality Software

Respondents identified several key challenges in delivering high-quality software at their organizations.

The most significant issue was managing technical debt while innovating on new features (69%), highlighting the ongoing tension between maintaining existing systems and driving forward progress.

Half of the respondents also pointed to ensuring effective testing and minimizing bugs in production (50%) as a major hurdle, while keeping up with rapidly evolving tools, frameworks, and technologies (46%) remains a persistent challenge.

Other commonly reported difficulties included:

Integrating legacy systems with modern technologies (41%)
Managing cloud infrastructure costs and complexity (39%)
Achieving consistent deployment frequency and reliability (35%)

Additionally, adopting and scaling DevOps practices across teams (31%) and scaling and optimizing software to handle increased user demand (26%) were seen as notable obstacles.

Overall, the data reflects that while innovation is a top priority, technical debt, system integration, and operational complexity continue to place significant demands on software teams.

Conclusion

In 2025, senior software leaders are focused on modernizing legacy systems, managing technical debt, and figuring out how to use AI effectively. While cloud-based AI platforms are becoming the norm, many teams still struggle with the skills, tools, and processes needed to make AI work in the real world. Core cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices are widely adopted, but newer, more complex tools are seeing slower uptake. Across the board, teams are balancing the need to innovate quickly with the realities of cost control, system complexity, and a constant need to learn and adapt.

Audience Demographics

The survey also included specific demographic questions on:

Professional Focus / Role in Organization
Company Size
Seniority (e.g. Do you manage/supervise others?)

If you are a software vendor that would like to see the complete results from this survey (including data from the ‘audience demographics’ and ‘commercial product adoption’ questions), please email us at sales@infoq.com.

Maximizing Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

InfoQ — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 13:14:26 GMT

Overview DoiT, a cloud optimization and engineering solutions provider, sought to enhance its demand generation efforts by leveraging high-value technical content. Partnering with O’Reilly and distributing content through InfoQ enabled DoiT to attract highly qualified leads, engage senior software influencers, and position itself as a thought leader in the industry.

The Challenge DoiT needed authoritative, long-form technical content to drive demand generation campaigns but lacked the internal resources to develop such content at scale. Additionally, they required a distribution channel that would effectively reach their target audience of senior software engineers and technical decision-makers.

The Solution: Partnering with O’Reilly and InfoQ DoiT turned to O’Reilly for high-quality technical eBooks and reports, leveraging them as gated assets in their marketing efforts. To maximize their reach and engagement, DoiT distributed this content through InfoQ’s native digital advertising and syndication programs.

By utilizing O’Reilly content on InfoQ, DoiT was able to:

Offer high-value gated content that resonated with their technical audience.
Leverage O’Reilly’s strong brand recognition to encourage lead generation.
Align follow-up messaging with the specific interests of prospects based on the content they engaged with.

Performance & Results DoiT’s InfoQ campaigns featuring O’Reilly content consistently delivered strong performance metrics:

High Engagement: Click-through rates (CTR) on O’Reilly content were consistently strong within InfoQ campaigns.
Effective Lead Generation: Senior software influencers and technical decision-makers were more likely to fill out lead forms for O’Reilly eBooks compared to other content types.
Proven ROI: DoiT has now sponsored five O’Reilly books, recognizing their continued effectiveness as demand generation assets.

Why O’Reilly Content? DoiT originally explored third-party content solutions for demand generation and tested multiple providers. O’Reilly content outperformed other vendors in both engagement and lead quality. Internally, DoiT engineers were already familiar with and valued O’Reilly books, reinforcing the decision to use them in marketing campaigns.

Additionally, producing similar long-form technical content in-house would have required significant time and resources. By sponsoring O’Reilly content, DoiT was able to focus its internal team on creating complementary content such as blogs, podcasts, and case studies.

Why InfoQ? InfoQ’s audience of senior software influencers and technical decision-makers provided the perfect distribution channel for O’Reilly content.

Targeted Reach: InfoQ campaigns allowed DoiT to connect with the ‘right’ audience.
Lead Quality: InfoQ consistently delivered prospects interested in technical content, aligning with DoiT’s ideal customer profile.
Brand Awareness & Conversion: While initially viewed as a brand awareness channel, InfoQ has proven to be a valuable lead generation source for DoiT, delivering a steady flow of high-quality leads.

Best Practices & Key Takeaways

Leverage Recognized Content: Using well-known technical resources like O’Reilly books increases engagement and lead capture rates.
Align Content with Audience Needs: InfoQ’s audience highly values technical depth, making O’Reilly content an ideal asset.
Monitor Performance & Refresh Content: DoiT typically sponsors O’Reilly books for 4-8 months, ensuring content remains fresh and relevant.
Combine Content with Targeted Distribution: High-quality content paired with the right platform maximizes ROI.

Conclusion By leveraging O’Reilly’s trusted technical content within InfoQ’s high-value audience, DoiT successfully enhanced its demand generation strategy. The partnership not only strengthened brand awareness but also delivered a consistent pipeline of qualified leads, making InfoQ a key component of DoiT’s marketing success.

For organizations seeking to engage senior technical audiences, sponsoring O’Reilly content and utilizing InfoQ’s targeted distribution channels offers a proven path to impactful demand generation.

“We’ve found that InfoQ’s audience of senior software influencers and technical decision makers respond well to technical content. This audience already recognizes the O’Reilly brand, and are willing to fill out a form to get a high-quality resource. This is a great way for us to introduce the DoiT brand to new prospects.”

-Jennifer Janes - Senior Demand Generation Marketing Manager

Supercharge Your Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

Let’s talk! Connect with Sharon Cordesse (scordesse@oreilly.com) and Bethany Vananda (Bethany.Vananda@c4media.com) to explore how this partnership can elevate your marketing strategy. Schedule a time to chat today!

InfoQ Trends Reports eMag; Key AI Innovations to Watch in 2025; Java State of the Union; Top Webinars and Content of 2024

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 19:19:57 GMT

Entering into its second year, InfoQ Dev Summit Boston (June 9-10, 2025), is designed to help senior developers navigate their immediate development challenges, focusing exclusively on the technical aspects that matter right now.

Exhibitor and sponsored speaking slots are available. Email sales@devsummit.infoq.com for more details.

The InfoQ Trends Reports 2024 eMag

As a B2B marketer, it’s important to stay abreast of the ever-evolving technology landscape, software development trends, and organizational practices. The 2024 InfoQ Trends Reports eMag not only highlights key software trends from the past year, it also provides a lens through which you can plan your 2025 marketing and product roadmaps.

Gain insights into topics such as cell-based architectures, working within socio-technical systems, large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs), and the state-of-the-art within the Java ecosystem.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

Java State of the Union: InfoQ Trends Report December 2024

The InfoQ December 2024 Java Trends Report highlights key shifts in the Java ecosystem for 2025. Java 17 leads JDK adoption, but usage remains fragmented, with Java 11 and Java 8 close behind, and Java 21 showing faster, though still modest, growth.

Java has shed its legacy image, embracing innovation with WebAssembly adoption catching up to Go and Rust. The AI surge of early 2024 has given way to more focused, practical applications. Meanwhile, the new Commonhaus Foundation supports open-source Java projects with succession planning and funding, signaling a dynamic and sustainable future for Java.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

QCon London 2024 (April 7-9) Sponsorships Still Available

Entering its 19th year, QCon London is the perennial conference for senior software engineers, architects, and technical team leads to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation in the software industry.

Some of this year’s QCon London track themes include:

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures, hosted by Dio Rettori, Multi-Cloud Strategy and Product @JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture", Java Champion, and InfoQ News Manager
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights, hosted by Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager @Zoox & Author of MLOps with Ray
Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, hosted by Ian Thomas, Software Engineer @Meta
Resilient Engineering Practices for Security Against Modern Threats, hosted by Sonya Moisset Staff Security Advocate @Snyk
Modern Data Architectures, hosted by Fabiane Nardon, Data Expert, Java Champion & Data Platform Director @totvs

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available for QCon London 2025. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

Case Studies

The Future of AI in 2025: Expert Perspectives from Srini Penchikala

In this interview, InfoQ Editor Srini Penchikala offers an insider's view of AI's horizon in 2025. He sees Small Language Models democratizing AI, making powerful technologies more accessible and privacy-friendly and believes that AI Agents will emerge as game-changers, potentially automating complex workflows with unprecedented intelligence. Penchikala also envisions specialized databases and domain-specific solutions transforming how businesses leverage AI, and urges marketers to showcase practical, impactful applications that solve real-world challenges.

Read the full interview

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2024

To help you gauge what software development leaders have been thinking about and reading over the past year, we’ve assembled a list of Top 10 Content published on InfoQ in 2024, based on page views:

The Future of AI in 2025: Expert Perspectives from Srini Penchikala

InfoQ — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 14:51:23 GMT

Hi Srini, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at InfoQ?

I serve as the Lead Editor for the AI Infrastructure Community on InfoQ. I have the honor and privilege of working with great folks in the AI space who are subject matter experts and practitioners in their field. With so much happening in AI/ML area, especially in Generative AI (GenAI) space, for the last few years, it's a great time to be part of this evolution as we see AI technologies become more and more integrated with every day activities whether it's in the business, at work or at home. I learn something new everyday from the excellent team at InfoQ.

With the advent of ChatGPT, we’ve been hearing a lot about Large Language Models (LLMs). What are Small Language Models and why are they important?

The AI space which was accelerated in terms of growth and adoption when GPT and ChatGPT were released back in 2022, GenAI and LLMs have pretty much taken over the AI landscape.

Large Language Models (LM) are the foundation of AI applications and play a critical role in developing the solution. LLMs at a high level, are language models with many parameters, and are pre-trained on a large amount of data. They typically contain billions of parameters and are capable of understanding and generating content (text, image or audio) based on input prompt statements. These models are very expensive to create, but they are very powerful in the capabilities they offer to solve AI/ML problems in the business domains.

We are witnessing LLMs being dominantly used in various business and technology use cases to create exciting new opportunities that we have never even thought about before. Not only for the end users but also for software engineers, the DevOps engineers and other groups to be more productive. LLMs have empowered pretty much the full life cycle of the process.

LLMs are powerful but they require significant computing resources to operate and you cannot just run it on a small machine or a small cluster of machines. There's also the privacy and data security factors where you may not be able to send the data to the cloud to leverage these LLMs.

This is where Small Language Models or SLMs can help. They offer many of the same benefits as LLMs, but they're smaller in size, they're trained using smaller data sets and they don't require a lot of computing resources. These models are obviously not for every use case out there. They are valuable for use cases where you have a constraint on the resources or you want to localize the model execution.

Another important technology to mention in the context of LLMs is the Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG. With RAG you can train the base model with your company's private information and then, you can use the new self-hosted model to ask questions and prompts that are specific to your business domain. We'll be seeing a lot more applications using RAG in 2025. Already a majority of production scale AI applications are using RAG.

AI agents have come a long way over the last 3-5 years. How do you feel they have matured and what’s their potential for automating software development processes?

There are a lot of different and diverse definitions of AI agents. With all the power of LLMs, the AI process execution can be vastly enhanced by a program that "acts" on the output of an LLM. These programs are called AI agents which can call, as part of a multi-step workflow, a certain task in order to implement a step in the workflow (https://huggingface.co/blog/smolagents).

Agent based applications can automate the end-to-end AI pipelines with multiple agents working together to accomplish the goals of the overall process. Another advantage of muti-agent based workflow applications is that each agent can talk to the agents in a feedback loop that enriches the agents to iteratively perform the steps better and better in every round and more importantly minimize the hallucinations.

Companies like OpenAI are going to have AI Agents as a big part of their strategy this year.

“The concept of AI agents is a big leap from current capabilities that require step-by-step prompting and a significant step towards superintelligence or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which is human-level or beyond human-level intelligence.” (Source)

I personally think 2025 will be the year of AI Agents as they can take the LLM applications to the next level by automatically taking actions based on the LLM output, instead of human users manually providing the input prompts in each and every step of the process.

With distributed databases underpinning many AI solutions, how do you see database vendors evolving their offerings to support AI-driven use cases?

Databases and Data Engineering processes are still important components of AI solutions. All AI applications require some type of data storage and data processing, so the database space has also been going through major transformation and innovations during the explosion of AI adoption in diverse applications.

Gen AI solutions have led to the growth and adoption of purpose driven data stores like Vector Databases. A vector database deals with types of data called Vectors which are the output of machine learning models and the way Generative AI models represent any type of data. These databases are highly specialized to work with vectors with specialized queries that search and find content by relevance, by similarity, by alignment in the numerical representation of vector embeddings.

A typical LLM based RAG application pipeline includes steps like Tokenization, Embedded Model, Language Model, Data Chunking, Orchestration, Retrieval, and Generation. So, there is a lot of areas that databases supporting LLM applications can innovate and improve in the next couple of years.

Also, speaking of RAG applications the data thats stored and processed in the real world is not always textual data, it can be audio, images, and video type of content that will require multi-model RAG solutions to solve the business problems. This is where the database vendors can focus on helping the developer community to efficiently store and process different types of data.

In addition to specialized databases like Vector databases, other data stores such as graph databases are seeing some renewed interest in AI solutions using RAG techniques. Since Graph NoSQL databases store the data in a graph format, these databases are a perfect complement to support LLM applications. We are going to see more and more Graph RAG based applications, to evolve from isolated nodes in a graph database to graph of knowledge (GoK) and finally Knowledge Graph RAG based applications.

I consider last year 2024 as the year of RAG in terms of AI adoption. In 2025, I envision the data storage solutions will see a significant growth in supporting the real world business application data to keep up with the ever growing "Omni-model RAG" solutions.

How can marketers effectively communicate the benefits of AI-driven tools to non-technical decision-makers, ensuring they understand both the potential and the practical applications?

Even with all the hype out there, AI technologies do offer significant advantages and productivity benefits in a plethora of applications and use cases. AI solutions can help solve many business and technical use cases. This is what marketers can focus on when communicating with non-technical decision makers and customers, highlighting the business problems and opportunities the AI applications can solve without getting into technical details.

With growing concerns about data privacy and responsible AI, what steps should vendors take to build trust with their audience, and how can marketers highlight these efforts effectively?

AI hallucinations, where AI models output inaccurate, non-relevant or misleading results, are a big concern when using AI applications. This can be minimized with practices like using high-quality training data, specifically defining the context on how the AI models will be used, and continuous testing and training of the model.

But a more comprehensive and strategic approach is to use AI Agents to address the AI hallucinations. Multi-agent workflows can be used to iteratively and incrementally improve the accuracy of the models and reduce the biases.

Also, AI governance is more important than ever to ensure the quality and fairness of AI solutions.

And, finally Explainable AI with its core principles of transparency, interpretability, causality, and fairness, can help the users trust the results and output created by AI applications.

Marketers and advocates can highlight to their audience these techniques to ensure that, if properly trained, executed, and governed, AI programs can be very powerful and accountable.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities for AI/ML software vendors in 2025?

In 2025, AI/ML software vendors will need to align their strategies and products with the development and adoption trends of AI technologies. Some of these focus areas are listed below:

More Business Domain Specific AI solutions (e.g. we may start to see domain specific LLM’s like a foundation model for healthcare industry to start taking shape)
Full SDLC Lifecycle
Multi-model RAG solutions
AI Agents and Agent based workflow solutions
Edge AI with AI powered devices
More Self-Hosted LLM models to deploy locally inside the organizations’ data centers or in private cloud w/o having to depend on cloud based commercial solutions.
AI Infrastructure will see significant changes to accommodate the developments in language models. The infrastructure will also start to embrace sustainable and green computing strategies to bring down the cost of training models.

As AI continues to evolve, how should marketers approach balancing the hype around new technologies with realistic, actionable benefits for their target audience?

The latest developments in AI technologies offer significant benefits to consumers, end users and IT professionals in all domains and sectors. But no doubt there is a lot of hype about AI. Marketers need to communicate what their audience should be excited about without getting distracted and disrupted by all the hype out there.

This can be done by focusing on the true value of AI technologies especially with trends like Generative AI and Languages Models (Large, Small and Micro) can bring to day-to-day applications.

Edge computing is another area where language models, especially small language models will shine. Edge AI programs will be hosted and executed on devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops etc., bringing the power of AI down to the devices at the hands of everyday users.

Marketers should highlight the business and technology use cases where AI technologies outperform the traditional approaches whether it’s healthcare, manufacturing, financial services or any other business domain.

AI, ML, & Data Engineering Trends Report 2024; QCon London '25 Tracks Announced; 2025 Webinar & Roundtable Dates Available

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:33:24 GMT

We are pleased to announce the 2025 InfoQ and QCon media kit. Key updates include:

QCon London 2025 tracks announced, sponsorships now open
InfoQ Dev Summit Boston dates confirmed: June 9-10, 2025
InfoQ Dev Summit Munich dates confirmed: Oct 15-16, 2025
2025 InfoQ Live Roundtable and 2025 Webinar dates available

Download Now

AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report - September 2024

The InfoQ Trends Reports provide readers with a high-level overview of key topics, while helping the InfoQ editorial team focus on innovative technologies. Highlights from the September 2024 “AI, ML, and Data Engineering Trends Report” include:

The future of AI is open and accessible. We’re in the age of LLM and foundation models. Most of the models available are closed source, but companies like Meta are trying to shift the trend toward open-source models.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) will become more important especially for applicable use cases of LLMs at scale.
AI-powered hardware will get much more attention with AI-enabled GPU infrastructure and AI-powered PCs.
Due to the constraints in infrastructure setup and management costs of LLMs, small language models (SLMs) will see more exploration and adoption.
AI Agents, like coding assistants, will also see more adoption, especially in corporate application development settings.
AI safety and security will continue to be important in the overall management lifecycle of language models. Self-hosted models and open-source LLM solutions can help improve the AI security posture.
Another important aspect of the LLM lifecycle is LangOps or LLMOps, which help support the models after deploying them to production.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

QCon London 2025 (April 7-9) Tracks Announced; Sponsorships Available

Tracks for QCon London 2025 (April 7-9) have been published. Some of the new track themes include:

AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights, hosted by Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager @Zoox & Author of MLOps with Ray
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Platform Engineer, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture", Java Champion, and InfoQ News Manager
How to be an Effective Architect in 2025, hosted by Andrew Harmel-Law, Technical Principal @Thoughtworks, Author of Facilitating Software Architecture
Engineering Productivity and Developer Experience, hosted by Blanca Rojo, Distinguished Engineer and Cloud Engineer @UBS
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures

See the complete list of track abstracts

Sponsorships are available for QCon London 2025. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

2025 InfoQ Webinar and InfoQ Live Roundtable Dates Now Available

By sponsoring InfoQ webinars, B2B marketers can target a highly engaged audience of senior practitioners, establish thought leadership, and generate high-quality leads from a global audience. The 60 minute format consists of a 30 minute technical presentation followed by a 30 minute Q&A, moderated by an InfoQ Editor who is also a domain expert on your topic.

2025 InfoQ Webinar Dates

January 16
February 6, 27
March 20
April 10
May 1, 22
June 12, 26
July 17
August 7, 28
September 18
October 9, 30
November 13
December 11

InfoQ Live Roundtables 2025

InfoQ Live Roundtables are online discussions hosted by InfoQ where industry experts and thought leaders gather to share their insights on specific topics related to software development and technology. The roundtables are live-streamed and allow participants to ask questions and engage in real-time discussions.

As a sponsor, your technical expert gets a ‘seat at the table’ along with fellow practitioners from the community.

2025 InfoQ Live Roundtable Dates:

January 21 - Sold
April 22 - Sold
June 24
August 19
November 12

Email sales@c4media.com to secure your 2025 dates.

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q3 2024

The top InfoQ content from the past three months reveals key trends shaping technical decision-making. Topics include in-depth case studies on custom-built databases, Java virtual threads, and large-scale microservices. Articles covering Decathlon’s architecture process and continuous deployment at Uber provide readers with actionable insights that they can apply to their own teams and projects.

GenAI Top Content and Campaigns; The Evolution of Java; QCon London PC Confirmed; New eMags: Platform Engineering, Java Performance, Python

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 16:17:01 GMT

InfoQ is delighted to announce a new two-day conference, InfoQ Dev Summit Munich, taking place September 26-27, 2024. This new event is designed to help senior developers navigate their immediate development challenges, focusing exclusively on the technical aspects that matter right now.

Exhibitor and sponsored speaking slots are available. Email sales@devsummit.infoq.com for more details.

InfoQ GenAI Roundup: Top Content, Ad Campaigns, and Recent Coverage

The topics of Generative AI (GenAI), Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine learning continue to dominate news headlines not only on InfoQ, but across the industry. These topics have also been pivotal to the success of a number of recent ad campaigns on InfoQ:

- The best performing sponsored asset so far this year has been HPE’s white paper “Exploring enterprise AI: An Introduction to LLMs, vector databases, and Retrieval Augmented Generation.”

- In June, Harness sponsored the InfoQ Live Roundtable “Developer Experience (DevEx) in the Age of Generative AI” which examined why the developer experience is a critical element for every engineering team and potential enhancements that AI can bring to the DevEx table.

- In July, InfoQ published the “Practical Applications of Generative AI” eMag. Sponsored by Composable Prompts, the eMag generated a record number of leads in the first two weeks

See InfoQ’s recent editorial coverage on GenAI

Case Studies

Integrating AI in Software Development and the Evolution of Java: Andrew Lombardi and Joseph Ottinger

In this interview, Andrew Lombardi and Joseph Ottinger share their experiences and insights on various topics including the integration of generative AI in software development, significant advancements in the enterprise Java ecosystem, and the evolving landscape of IoT systems. They also discuss their new book, "Beginning Spring 6: From Beginner to Pro," strategies for staying ahead of emerging technologies, and advice for B2B marketers aiming to connect with software development leaders.

Read the full interview

New InfoQ eMags Available for Sponsorship: Generative AI/LLMs, Python in the Enterprise, Cell-Based Architecture

InfoQ eMags are professionally designed, downloadable collections of popular InfoQ articles covering the latest software development technologies, trends, and topics.

As a sponsor, you get a one page sponsored article placement within eMag along with a minimum of 300 world-wide leads generated via your opt-in message.

The following eMags - slated to publish in late Q3 and Q4 2024 - are currently available for sponsorship:

Platform Engineering
Python in the Enterprise
Java Performance
The 2024 End-of-Year eMag

Email sales@c4media.com to learn more about available eMag sponsorships.

QCon London 2025 (April 7-9) Program Committee Confirmed

The program committee for the 19th annual QCon London (April 7-9, 2025) has been confirmed:

Sarah Wells - Independent Consultant and Author
Blanca Garcia Gil - Independent Data Consultant, previously Principal Engineer on data platform @BBC
Chris Swan - Engineer @atsigncompany, InfoQ Editor
Eder Ignatowicz - Senior Principal Software Engineer @Red Hat, Staff Engineer @OpenShift AI, Java Champion, Speaker, Program Committee Member
Ian Thomas - Software Engineer @Meta
Srini Penchikala - Senior Software Architect, Lead Editor for AI/ML/Data Engineering @InfoQ
Werner Schuster - InfoQ Editor Functional Programming, @Wolfram

Explore the QCon London 2025 Provisional Tracks

Sponsorships are now open for QCon London 2025. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q2 2024

InfoQ GenAI Roundup: Top Content, Ad Campaigns, and Recent Coverage

InfoQ — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 14:34:48 GMT

Just over halfway into the year, the topics of Generative AI (GenAI), Large Language Models (LLMs) and all things machine learning continue to dominate industry headlines, product roadmaps, and the tech startup scene.

These topics have also been pivotal to the success of a number of recent sponsored campaigns on InfoQ:

- The best performing sponsored asset so far this year has been HPE’s white paper “Exploring enterprise AI: An Introduction to LLMs, vector databases, and more,”

- In June, Harness sponsored the InfoQ Live Roundtable “Developer Experience in the Age of Generative AI” which proved to be a popular topic amongst readers

- In July, InfoQ published the “Practical Applications of Generative AI” eMag. Sponsored by Composable Prompts, the eMag generated a record number of leads in the first two weeks

Editorial Coverage on InfoQ

The topic of GenAI has also been a big part of our recent editorial and conference coverage on InfoQ.

In her QCon London presentation, The AI Revolution Will Not Be Monopolized (summarized by Daniel Dominguez) Ines Montani argues that - in order to avoid heading into a world of big tech monopolization of LLMs - we need to get behind open-source initiatives that can help us democratize AI technology, offering transparent, extensible tools that empower users.

At the inaugural InfoQ Dev Summit Boston, Justin Sheehy of Akamai delivered an opening keynote on being a responsible developer in the age of artificial intelligence hype. The talk was aimed at software practitioners who might be feeling overwhelmed by the rapid developments and inflated expectations surrounding AI.

Lastly, Alex Cruikshank recently discussed where GenAI is likely to have the greatest impact, steps to manage this change, and ways to leverage the shift to AI mediated work to better understand business processes.

Here are the Top 10 AI-related content pieces published on InfoQ so far this year:

Integrating AI in Software Development and the Evolution of Java: Andrew Lombardi and Joseph Ottinger

InfoQ — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:47:23 GMT

In this interview, Andrew Lombardi, the head geek at Mystic, and Joseph Ottinger, a seasoned programmer, share their experiences and insights on various topics including the integration of generative AI in software development, significant advancements in the enterprise Java ecosystem, and the evolving landscape of IoT systems. They also discuss their new book, "Beginning Spring 6: From Beginner to Pro," strategies for staying ahead of emerging technologies, and advice for B2B marketers aiming to connect with software development leaders. Through their candid conversation, Andrew and Joe provide a comprehensive look at the current state and future trends of the tech industry.

InfoQ: Joe, Andrew, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re up to these days?

Andrew: Andrew here, I’m the head geek in charge at Mystic where we opened our doors in 2000 (fun year for tech). We’ve been in business for 24 years now and have helped companies as big as Walmart or as controversial as Twitter 1.0 succeed in their project goals. After a nearly 5 year engagement with Twitter we’ve stayed in flight helping companies succeed and deploying solutions using a variety of technologies and platforms including: Java (of course), Kotlin, React, Python and Rust. We’ve got some R&D projects with generative AI and doing plain ‘ole boring AI / machine learning for some clients as well.

Joe: And I’m Joe! I’m pretty much a meerkat of little brain or something, churning out content on a fairly regular basis. I’ve been programming for something like - gosh, how old am I? - over forty years now, starting with BASIC on a Timex/Sinclair 1000 and progressing through Pascal, COMAL, COBOL, xBase, the C-likes (C and C++), Cold Fusion, Perl, Python, and on into Java, Scala, and Kotlin, and probably a bunch I have forgotten or want to forget. I’ve focused a lot of energy on transfer of information throughout my career, trying to bend the envelope where I can and make sure others can see farther than I can, which is part of why I’ve tried to write for so long over my career.

InfoQ: What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges for integrating generative AI into software development, and how do you address the common misconceptions about AI potentially replacing human roles?

Andrew: The most significant opportunity is also the greatest challenge: How to take advantage of generative AI while maintaining quality and ensuring the written code solves the real problems. A lot of talk around AI involves it “taking your jobs” and while that is always the case for an emerging technology those who benefit the most are the ones who can adopt and use it as a multiplier in their role.

Joe: The biggest challenge there is, I think, awareness. Most people think of AI as this giant blob of… something. They don’t really know what it does, they just ask it a question and it responds with something that confirms their biases, for the most part, and thus it’s sort of like the abyss looking back at you - if it says the same thing you might have said, well, surely it can do what you do, thus it’s a competitor, right?

But that’s not the way it actually is - what it’s feeding back to you is what other people might have said themselves, so it’s really regurgitating a sort of ‘inferenced’ common knowledge, but that’s not the same as real knowledge or real innovation.

Humans are always going to be more flexible; the computer blends better and faster, but we’re better thinkers, and likely always will be. There is our opportunity: when it comes to AI, we can know better than the AI can about what the limits are, and how to focus and exploit them. AI is a better mousetrap for some kinds of problems, is all. It’s horribly useful, especially for those problems, and gosh, I rely on it! But without me knowing how to focus it, it’s not going to be able to replace me. [That’s what the AI told me to write, at least. Was it good?]

InfoQ: The enterprise Java development ecosystem has experienced notable changes and advancements in recent years. What would you say are some of the biggest developments and trends?

Joe: I think the biggest shifts have come from the JDK team itself. Coding on the JVM hadn’t changed all that much in years - people managed to shoehorn reactive and functional programming on the JVM with quite a bit of success, really, considering how little the JVM catered to those paradigms, but once Java 11 came out and we started seeing actual technical innovation in the JVM again, you saw real support for functional programming come into play, and with Java 21 and Loom, you see reactive programming really starting to come into its own without having to require such specialized code, for the most part. The JDK team isn’t stopping there: the native method invocation process is mutating, we’re likely to see native primitive types at last… just a lot of little things that we really wished Java to have for a decade or more are really starting to come into play.

How will that affect the library ecosystem? It’s hard to say. Right now, it’s mostly incidental improvement, because the ecosystem as a whole still has to support the older JVMs, but as that requirement lessens and people learn more about what the new JVM features are doing for them, we’ll see more mutations and better from the ecosystem as a whole. Or so I think!

InfoQ: Earlier this year, you and Andrew published a new book, “Beginning Spring 6: From Beginner to Pro” (By Apress). How are developers using Spring in 2024? What kinds of applications are they building?

Joe: I don’t think it’s really changed: people are still building complex variants of the PetStore, over and over and over again. The requirements are different - we’re now seeing security moved around and done in a lot of varying ways, you see a lot of messaging and data warehousing take place where people want to preserve application state so they can replay it at will, and so forth - but from ten thousand feet, it’s largely the same, with some of the library names being changed from place to place.

It’s a lot stronger now than it was - the days of having to roll up Struts actions are long gone, and you really don’t do WebMVC the way you used to either, unless you have fairly archaic requirements - people expect rich front ends now, and some of the performance enhancements you have at your disposal are different than they used to be. And deployment has exploded. Thankfully, there’s a huge body of knowledge out there to help - it’s not all the way there, yet, but that’s the way growth is; people start working with the raw materials and refine until there’s a standard practice.

InfoQ: Joe, you've recently been involved in designing and deploying services for Internet of Things (IoT) integration across various platforms. Could you share some details about your work in this field? Additionally, how are edge computing and AI influencing the development and deployment of IoT systems?

Joe: It’s changing the deployment model. IoT has really brought languages that have VMs to the forefront; we’re not really doing ladder programming or machine-level coding as much as we used to, especially for rapid development. You certainly can - I’d never sneer at someone using Rust for deployment on an IoT platform, for example, although I’d marvel at their investment in compilation times - but what I have seen in IoT is a focus on languages like Node, Python, and the JVM (even the JVM, which has much better performance on small devices than it did!) because they enable reliable cross-platform much better than they used to.

Of course, what we’re not seeing very much is a focus on security - everyone in IoT I know is aware of it, and is aware of the looming disaster that IoT security represents, but it’s a problem we’ve not really solved well yet. There are rumblings, and there have been for years; who knows, maybe Matter can help us solve it once and for all? But I still have my doubts.

As far as AI: AI on IoT is still an external service. None of the devices I’ve deployed on, even the “bigger devices,” have the horses to actually do any of the really fun AI models. They can do some of the inferencing and other simpler math-based models, but that’s not really what people think of these days when they think of AI: They think of conversational models, and those are expensive on those tiny boxes. Running a simple “Hi, how are you today” query… well… if I issued it on one of my better edge devices when I first picked up this interview, let’s just say that it would almost be ready to respond with its first word.

InfoQ: Andrew, as a company that has embraced remote work for 24 years, how have you adapted to the recent industry-wide acceptance and challenges of remote work since 2020? What strategies have you implemented to maintain team cohesion and productivity across multiple time zones?

Andrew: The changes we’ve seen in the industry since 2020 is an acceptance (and for some more recently a backlash) of knowledge workers being able to ditch the commute and work from wherever they felt comfortable. An investment in connectivity and ample hardware and desk setups in the home during the pandemic has paved the way for converts to the work from home lifestyle. The changes involve nurturing a team that spans multiple time zones and occasionally having conference calls at 4 a.m. The online tools are all available and have evolved enough to ensure your team's success.

InfoQ: As the industry evolves, what strategies do you employ to ensure you and your team stays ahead of the curve in terms of adopting emerging technologies and methodologies, and how can B2B marketers align their offerings with these evolving needs?

Andrew: Our team is always focused on helping our clients succeed in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. To that end, we encourage our team to contribute to open source projects and have hobbies which for engineers usually involves learning a random programming language “for fun”. The folks on our team have been in the industry usually for a decade or more, so emerging technologies and methodologies are taken with a grain of salt and evaluated for how it can help our clients. Marketers can align their offerings by providing a wealth of instructional material and guides which make adoption if it is appropriate for our client super simple.

InfoQ: When researching new technologies, what sites/publications do you typically visit?

Andrew: These days it ends up being found through searches with DuckDuckGo, or Perplexity and interrogating the other various large language models out there for the source material links back to Reddit or StackOverflow.

Joe: For me, I talk to anyone and everyone as if I’m a total neophyte. No judgment. If someone tells me about the new hotness, I don’t care if it’s a technology I’m familiar with or not, or even if it’s a deployment environment I use; if you mention, say, “Primate JS” and describe what it is and what it does, I want to be a constant learner, because you never know what really cool idea or tech is lurking behind someone’s raw passion. You never know how your perspective will change when someone else’s input is respected.

InfoQ: What advice would you give to B2B marketers looking to reach software development leaders?

Andrew: Tutorials on their products, show it in action, and write the examples in the most appropriate languages. If your product is hidden behind a sales lead generation form with no way to kick the tires or read more, you’ve already lost.

Joe: Holy cow, yes! Approach the product from a stance of ignorance. If someone who knows nothing about your product or service can’t figure it out in two minutes or less, you’ve lost them - even if they have to use your service, they’re never going to really buy in. Show, don’t tell. Fill in all the gaps. Assume they know little about how you think about problems.

Tracks Announced for QCon San Francisco 2024

InfoQ — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 13:45:15 GMT

The program committee for the 18th annual QCon San Francisco (Nov 18-22, 2024) has finalized the 2024 tracks, which include:

Modern Data Architectures: A showcase of how innovators are finding new ways to store, analyze, and scale data components.
Generative AI in Production & Advancements: A deep dive into the latest advancements, exploring how to translate groundbreaking research into real-world applications across various industries.
Architectures You've Always Wondered About: This track will explore real-world examples of innovative companies pushing the limits with modern software systems.
Hardware Architectures You Need To Know: Learn how hardware has moved significantly in different directions to serve the needs of our ever-complex service with Machine Learning, Networking, Graphics Processing, and more.
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade: A deep dive into innovative programming languages, language features, cutting-edge programming models, and paradigm shifts that aid in making code more efficient, safe, and maintainable.
Sociotechnical Resilience: Explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping traditional leadership models and the skills required for engineering leaders to effectively guide teams in the age of AI.
Getting Started in Machine Learning: An examination of the theoretical and practical considerations in ML and understands the tools and platforms that make up the discipline.
Explore all tracks.

To learn more about QCon San Francisco 2024 sponsorship opportunities, email sales@c4media.com

Architecture & Design Trends Report 2024; Cloud Marketing Insights; New eMag Sponsorships: Cell-Based Architecture, Python, Generative AI/LLMs

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:54:50 GMT

InfoQ is delighted to announce two new two-day conferences, InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2024, taking place June 24-25, 2024 and InfoQ Dev Summit Munich, taking place September 26-27, 2024. These events are designed to help senior developers navigate their immediate development challenges, focusing exclusively on the technical aspects that matter right now.

Exhibitor and sponsored speaking slots are available. Email sales@devsummit.infoq.com for more details.

The InfoQ Software Architecture & Design Trends Report 2024

As a B2B marketer, it’s important to stay abreast of the ever-evolving technology landscape, software development trends, and organizational practices. The InfoQ Trends Reports aims to highlight innovator and early-adopter technologies to help software leaders drive innovation at their companies. Key highlights from the April 2024 InfoQ Architecture & Design Trends report include:

Organizations are adopting cell-based architectures that contain and isolate a set of related services. The benefits include reduced latency, increased reliability, and cost savings.
Data continues to be a major force in architectural decisions. Complex analytical platforms and ML models are no longer considered secondary components as they shift towards core parts of transactional systems.
With the ideas from Team Topologies spreading across the industry, architects are giving more thought to the socio-technical factors of who will build and maintain the components of a system.

Read the full report

Listen to the accompanying podcast

Case Studies

Exploring Trends in Cloud Computing: Insights from Renato Losio

InfoQ recently sat down with seasoned cloud architect, Renato Losio, to get his thoughts on the current trends and challenges in cloud computing. In addition to providing valuable reflections on the cloud technology landscape, he also provides guidance on how B2B marketers can optimize their offerings to better meet the needs of cloud professionals.

Read the full interview

New InfoQ eMags Available for Sponsorship: Generative AI/LLMs, Python in the Enterprise, Cell-Based Architecture

InfoQ eMags are professionally designed, downloadable collections of popular InfoQ articles covering the latest software development technologies, trends, and topics. Designed for busy practitioners, eMags aim to help senior software engineers, technical team leads, and architects get quickly up-to-speed on innovator and early adopter stage technologies and approaches.

As a sponsor, you get a one page sponsored article placement within eMag along with a minimum of 300 world-wide leads generated via your opt-in message.

The following eMags - slated to publish in late Q2 and Q3 2024 - are currently available for sponsorship:

Generative Al/Large Language Models (LLMs)
Python in the Enterprise
Cell-based Architecture

Email sales@c4media.com to learn more about available eMag sponsorships.

QCon San Francisco 2024 (November 18-20) Tracks Announced

Entering its 18th year, QCon San Francisco is the perennial conference for senior software engineers, architects, and technical team leads to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation in the software industry.

Some of this year’s QCon San Francisco track themes include:

Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, hosted by Thomas Betts, Laureate Application Architect at Blackbaud, Lead Editor for Architecture & Design at InfoQ
Modern Data Architectures
Generative AI in Production & Advancements, hosted by Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager @DoorDash & Author of Beginning Apache Spark 3
Hardware Architectures You Need to Know, hosted by Yao Yue, Platform Engineer, Distributed System Aficionado, Founder of IOP Systems
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade

See the complete list of track abstracts.

Sponsorships are still available for QCon San Francisco 2024. For more information, please email sales@c4media.com

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q1 2024

Exploring Trends in Cloud Computing: Insights from Renato Losio

InfoQ — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:56:34 GMT

InfoQ recently sat down with seasoned cloud architect, Renato Losio, to get his thoughts on the current trends and challenges in cloud computing. In this interview, Renato explores the evolving domain of cloud architecture, highlighting the increasing prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential for specialized services offered by providers beyond the major players. In addition to providing valuable reflections on the cloud technology landscape, he also provides guidance on how B2B marketers can optimize their offerings to better meet the needs of cloud professionals.

InfoQ: Hi Renato, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're up to these days?

Renato: I currently live between two cities in Italy and Germany - Trieste and Berlin - where I work remotely as a cloud architect focusing on storage services and relational databases, mostly on AWS. As an InfoQ editor, I love to cover cloud-related topics and anything that is open-source technology. I recently accepted to be the chair for the very first InfoQ Dev Summit in Munich, so I am looking forward to planning the tracks and speakers for what I hope will be a great conference.

InfoQ: How do you stay up-to-date on the latest trends and how do you determine which technologies are worth covering on InfoQ?

Renato: I'm a lazy software engineer, so I will never be able to keep myself up to date just by willpower. Writing for InfoQ forces me to stay ahead of the curve. My goal - both as an InfoQ reader and editor - is to filter out the noise and plethora of product announcements. Even if you consider just the three biggest cloud providers - Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud - we’re talking about a hundred announcements every week.

A cloud architect cannot easily parse such a large volume of news. As a reader, InfoQ helps me figure out what's important. As an editor, I try to look for the “hidden gems” beyond the big announcements, things that might have an immediate impact on the job of a software engineer. I like to focus on the small incremental changes that may not have that “wow effect,” but can immediately make life easier for practitioners.

InfoQ: The concept of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments appears to be getting traction. What are some of the major cloud trends that marketers should be paying attention to in 2024?

Renato: The primary reference should be the annual InfoQ DevOps and Cloud Report. I believe the evolution of cloud technology has shifted from being revolutionary to a more evolutionary trajectory. There seems to be a consensus in this regard. While numerous announcements and developments are occurring, such as those seen at re:Invent, there's a lack of breakthroughs, with one notable exception: artificial intelligence (AI).

Additionally, there has been a noticeable focus on sustainability and green computing, particularly evident in conference announcements. I believe the majority of the community still views sustainability primarily as a proxy for cost optimization. Thus, they have not fully embraced the concept of sustainability in cloud computing but rather see it mainly as another way to save dollars in the deployment. While there is often a correlation between sustainability and cost savings, it's not always the case. I hope there will be a shift in perception among practitioners.

Another trend is the concept of frugal architectures, as highlighted by the CTO of Amazon at the latest re:Invent conference. The idea revolves around cloud-native architectures that aim to deliver cost-aware, sustainable, and maintainable solutions.

Finally, a topic that has garnered significant attention on InfoQ is "Cloud Computing in the Post-Serverless Era." Bilgin Ibryam suggests a shift from relying solely on the major hyperscalers towards a proliferation of specialized vertical providers. These providers may offer specific services such as partitioned databases or managed CI/CD, fostering a more vertical approach to cloud services across multiple platforms. Users may ultimately opt to utilize third-party services to access these offerings rather than directly engaging with the providers themselves.

InfoQ: What motivates cloud developers and architects and how can marketers better engage with them?

Renato: One of the most challenging aspects revolves around complexity. When attending industry events or conferences, there's often a tendency to become highly enthused and applaud major announcements, inspirational ideas, and the like. However, there are also challenges to contend with. Attending such events often marks the introduction of new challenges. It's like a technical milestone for me. While I may applaud new features or services, that is the moment where I realize that what I previously thought was a well-architected deployment may no longer suffice in light of these announcements. It is the day the goalposts shift, presenting me with fresh hurdles to overcome.

The initial euphoria transforms into new challenges that consistently keep cloud architects engaged. In a way, it feels akin to buying into a trend. I've observed certain architectures, deployments, and services that were undoubtedly cutting-edge five years ago, which were considered cool at the time, but have since become commonplace. The constantly shifting standards keep pushing us forward.

InfoQ: Migrating to the cloud, cloud cost reduction, and moving to a hybrid cloud were cited as the biggest ‘cloud-related’ technical challenges for InfoQ readers, based on the results of an Oct 2022 reader survey. Do these continue to be major challenges in 2024? What do you currently see as the biggest obstacles to organizations realizing the full potential of cloud technology?

Renato: These are all still big challenges today. Initially, there was widespread acceptance of the idea that the cloud is elastic, allowing users to pay only for what they use, which was indeed advantageous and remains true today. However, the deployments are now more complex, necessitating an iterative approach to cost optimization. Furthermore, utilizing multiple clouds can be both beneficial and problematic.

On one hand, the hybrid cloud offers integration opportunities with data from various sources, including on-premises environments. On the other hand, it poses challenges, particularly considering the rapid expansion of services and options provided by the major providers. Fifteen years ago, AWS offered less than 10 services, which surged to almost 200 options five years ago, and now I have lost count.

Each cloud provider has thousands of different components to consider in their pricing structure. While not all components apply to every deployment scenario, any cloud architect claiming significant cost savings without conducting a thorough data analysis is either overly optimistic or attempting to sell a product or service.

InfoQ: According to a January 2024 report from Hava.io, “Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintains the highest market share at 32%, followed by Microsoft Azure (23%) and Google Cloud (10%).” Do you anticipate any major shifts in cloud market share - amongst ‘the big three’ - in the coming years? What might be driving these shifts?

Renato: I have some reservations regarding trusting percentages in general, as they can vary depending on how the numbers are derived. However, many companies are increasingly adopting diverse cloud deployments for various reasons, such as through mergers and acquisitions or due to specialized teams working with specific technologies. From my experience, most companies that utilize multiple cloud providers still have a dominant one in their deployment. I anticipate minimal changes within the big three cloud providers, but for the first time, AWS is not the disrupter and has to catch Microsoft and Google in generative AI.

I'm curious to observe how other providers are gaining traction. For example, Cloudflare has evolved from a CDN provider to a full-fledged cloud provider, competing directly with serverless technology and object storage alternatives. Whether it's through increasing their market share or offering novel alternatives in unique ways, I anticipate a broader range of options emerging within the cloud computing landscape.

InfoQ: As an InfoQ editor, you bring extensive experience as a cloud architect, tech lead, and cloud services specialist. How does your professional work inform your InfoQ writing? How has writing for InfoQ helped you in your career?

Renato: The greatest advantage of InfoQ is the opportunity to interact with remarkable individuals I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Whether it's through writing news articles, attending QCon events, or serving as a conference chair, I've had the chance to engage with incredible people.

Before my involvement with InfoQ, I was somewhat entrenched in a narrower perspective. Having predominantly focused on AWS for nearly a decade, I was confined to a bubble. This isn't to say that AWS is inadequate; it's an exceptional and captivating platform. However, I had limited exposure to alternative approaches and deployments. InfoQ has provided me with the opportunity to broaden my horizons and explore different methodologies and deployments, affording me a more well-rounded understanding of the landscape.

InfoQ: Looking ahead, Renato, what do you envision as the next frontier in cloud architecture and services?

Renato: In the upcoming years, the predominant focus will continue to be on integrating AI into every facet of cloud services. Additionally, a trend I've noticed is the concerted effort to streamline complexity. Over time, the cloud has evolved from offering just a few services to now boasting hundreds of distinct offerings. Consequently, developers have to determine which services to utilize, how to connect various components, and how to integrate different pieces effectively.

For many years, discussions at conferences have revolved around finding ways to manage this escalating complexity and I anticipate that AI will play a pivotal role in addressing this challenge. At least, that's my hope for the future.

InfoQ: What advice do you have for B2B marketers looking to reach cloud architects in 2024 with new services and offerings?

Renato: As a cloud architect, there are two primary concerns I always consider when approaching new services or features. Firstly, I evaluate the ease of integration into my existing deployment. This doesn't just pertain to the technological aspect but extends to logistical considerations as well. For instance, can I seamlessly incorporate your technology using a marketplace from a major cloud vendor, or would I need to establish a new contract with another provider?

Most cloud architects have significant control over their deployments and AWS costs. For example, a cloud architect might be able to decide for thousands of euros on AWS billing, even for third-party providers, without encountering obstacles. However, acquiring licenses or subscriptions often involves a different procurement process. Thus, the ease of integration is crucial.

The second concern revolves around the reluctance to adopt multi-cloud or external services. It's not because these services aren't superior; in fact, I'm aware of many that outperform alternatives. For instance, MongoDB Atlas may be a superior technology compared to AWS DocumentDB, which is sometimes viewed as a subpar managed option. However, if the NoSQL database is not the crucial component of the deployment, simplicity and GDPR requirements make it more convenient to consolidate everything within a single provider.

Convincing me to overcome this barrier requires demonstrating that the added effort is worthwhile. In Europe, especially for large companies, these considerations are important. When someone claims there's no overhead, I'm usually skeptical and interpret it as an attempt to make a sale rather than an accurate assessment of the situation.

InfoQ Developer Marketing Newsletter (Quarterly)

Key Software Trends of the Year; AI-Era Insights for Architects; Java State of the Union; Top Webinars and Content of 2025

The InfoQ Trends Reports 2025 eMag

Java State of the Union: InfoQ Trends Report December 2025

20th Anniversary: QCon London 2026 (March 16-18); Sponsorships Still Available

Next-Gen Architecture Playbook: AI-Era Insights for Modern Architects

Top InfoQ Webinar Topics of 2025; Available 2026 Dates

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2025

What’s Next for AI; Dev Advocacy Insights; QCon London 2026

Top AI Trends for 2025: What B2B Marketers Need to Know

QCon London 2026 (March 16-18) -Track Topics Confirmed

Case Studies

Developer Advocacy: Building Trust, Measuring Impact, and Adapting to AI

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q3 2025

Developer Advocacy: Building Trust, Measuring Impact, and Adapting to AI

The Accidental Advocate

Journalism, Empathy, and Product Thinking

Measuring Success Without Losing the Plot

Marketing Goals vs. Developer Trust

Building Scalable, Authentic Content

Lessons from Community Building

Reporting Lines and Cross-Team Collaboration

AI as an Assistant, Not a Replacement

The Future of Discovery and API Adoption

What Makes a Great API Experience

Avoiding an AI Echo Chamber

Transitioning from DevRel to Program Management

How QCon Attracts Decision Makers

How QCon Connects You with Enterprise Organizations

How QCon Delivers Quality Leads from Decision Makers

Top Software Architecture Trends; New AI Engineering eMags; Akka’s Demand Gen Breakthrough; QConSF 2025 Tracks Confirmed

Top Trends in Software Architecture for 2025: What B2B Marketers Need to Know

New eMags Available for Sponsorship: Rise of the AI Engineer, Architecting for Data Sovereignty, and Team Dynamics

QCon San Francisco 2025 (November 17-19) -Track Topics and Hosts Confirmed

Case Studies

Architecting Trust: Akka’s Demand Gen Breakthrough with InfoQ and O’Reilly

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q2 2025

Architecting Trust: Akka’s Demand Gen Breakthrough with InfoQ and O’Reilly

Overview

The Challenge

The Solution

The Results

Why InfoQ + O'Reilly?

Key Takeaways

InfoQ 2025 Technology Adoption Report; DoIT Demand Gen Case Study; QConSF '25 Tracks Announced; Top 10 Content

The InfoQ 2025 Technology Adoption Report

QCon San Francisco 2025 (November 17-19) -Track Topics Announced

Case Studies

Maximizing Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q1 2025

InfoQ 2025 Technology Adoption Survey Results

Table of Contents

Key Technical Challenges Faced by Software Practitioners in 2025

Key Challenges in AI/ML Adoption

AI Infrastructure Priorities for 2025

Cloud-Native Technology Adoption

Top Architectural Challenges in Modern Systems

Challenges in Managing Databases and Data Engineering Efforts

Database and Data Engineering Technology Adoption

Challenges in Delivering High-Quality Software

Conclusion

Audience Demographics

Maximizing Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

InfoQ Trends Reports eMag; Key AI Innovations to Watch in 2025; Java State of the Union; Top Webinars and Content of 2024

The InfoQ Trends Reports 2024 eMag

Java State of the Union: InfoQ Trends Report December 2024

QCon London 2024 (April 7-9) Sponsorships Still Available

Case Studies

The Future of AI in 2025: Expert Perspectives from Srini Penchikala

Top InfoQ Webinar Topics of 2024; Available 2025 Dates

InfoQ Top 10 Content of 2024

The Future of AI in 2025: Expert Perspectives from Srini Penchikala

AI, ML, & Data Engineering Trends Report 2024; QCon London '25 Tracks Announced; 2025 Webinar & Roundtable Dates Available

AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report - September 2024

QCon London 2025 (April 7-9) Tracks Announced; Sponsorships Available

2025 InfoQ Webinar and InfoQ Live Roundtable Dates Now Available

InfoQ Live Roundtables 2025

InfoQ Top 10 Content of Q3 2024

GenAI Top Content and Campaigns; The Evolution of Java; QCon London PC Confirmed; New eMags: Platform Engineering, Java Performance, Python

InfoQ GenAI Roundup: Top Content, Ad Campaigns, and Recent Coverage