Top Technology Trends to Watch Out for in 2024 for Platform Engineering and SRE 📈

8 min readJan 2, 2024

What to Watch Closely and Keep an Eye On this year 👀

🔍 Introduction:

As we are in 2024, it’s important to stay updated on the latest technology trends that will shape the future of the industry.

In this article, we will explore the top technology trends for DevOps, SRE, and platform engineers. These trends include CI/CD, Gitops, security, single layer containers, AI, observability, and more.

By staying updated on these trends, professionals can remain competitive and relevant in the industry.

As AI continues to play a significant role in the ecosystem, more bespoke AI solutions could revolutionize how monitoring tools and service-level objectives are managed, we need to keep up to date with new trends. This blog was inspired by this great article.

STAY UPDATED🔥 !!

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents: 
. Cilium's Tetragon Impact on kubernetes Security
· Hubble's Role in kubernetes Observability and Networking
· AI for Kubernetes Operations: K8sgpt
· Tekton
· Timoni: A possible Alternative to Helm
· OpenTofu
. Bonus: other technologies to track
  ∘ OpenBao
  ∘ Generative AI
  ∘ Middlware.io
  ∘ Nix & NixOS

🐝 Cilium’s Tetragon Impact on Kubernetes Security:

One of the most significant technology trends to watch out for is the increasing importance of Kubernetes security.

Cilium, an open-source software built on top of eBPF, is set to play a big role in shaping the security landscape of Kubernetes environments.

check out this cool list of tools related to cilium: https://github.com/seifrajhi/awesome-cilium

Tetragon, a component of Cilium, is an eBPF-based security observability and runtime enforcement platform that provides fine-grained observability, policy definition, and enforcement for the class of security vulnerabilities that live in custom code

It has gained significant traction since its announcement months ago at KubeCon, and its recent 1.0 release highlights the growing importance of Cilium and its associated technologies in the field of Kubernetes security.

For those of you who got curious about Tetragon, I recommend checking out one of the many available free labs by Isovalent, e.g. Getting Started with Tetragon — they’re great, get you up and running in no time, and you will get a badge upon completion!

🛰 Hubble’s Role in Kubernetes Observability and Networking:

Another gem is Hubble 🛰, a fully distributed networking and security observability platform, is poised to make a substantial impact, particularly in the context of Kubernetes networking and security.

As a component of Cilium, Hubble enables deep visibility into the communication and behavior of Kubernetes pods with a focus on connectivity and security.

Its metrics allow for the monitoring of the network behavior of Cilium-managed Kubernetes pods, while also providing insights into the state of Cilium itself. Hubble’s user-friendly interface and the ability to export its metrics for visualization in setups such as Prometheus + Grafana further enhance its appeal.

By leveraging eBPF for visibility and offering programmable visibility, Hubble presents a dynamic approach that minimizes overhead while maximizing performance.

🤖 AI for Kubernetes Operations: k8sgpt:

Now I want to talk about k8sgpt. With version 0.1.0 released in late March this year, it has been accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project on December 19th, less than 9 months later.

In what can be called the year of AI, it’s no surprise that a project like this has experienced such a rapid growth and adoption, though it’s still impressive: 55 contributors cut 43 releases over 863 commits so far, and the project has been starred 3.7k times to date.1

The project’s goal is to help operators and developers troubleshooting, securing, and optimizing their Kubernetes clusters. The project’s CLI works with every CNCF-conformant Kubernetes distribution, and you can combine it with several different AI models depending on your use case.

I’m definitely looking forward to putting k8sgpt through its paces in 2024 should I come across a tough problem that I can’t solve on my own, and I’m quite sure I’ll like what I’ll see.

🐈 Tekton:

Tekton is an open-source framework for creating CI/CD systems, offering flexibility and power to handle various deployment environments and cloud providers as well as on-premise. It standardizes CI/CD tooling and processes across vendors, languages, and deployment environments.

Tekton is compatible with a range of popular tools like Jenkins and Knative, providing scalable, serverless, cloud-native execution. Its ability to abstract the underlying implementation allows teams to tailor their build, test, and deploy workflows to their specific needs.

The Tekton Pipelines project provides k8s-style resources for declaring CI/CD-style pipelines.

Tekton Pipelines are Cloud Native:

Run on Kubernetes
Have Kubernetes clusters as a first class type
Use containers as their building blocks

Tekton Pipelines are Decoupled:

One Pipeline can be used to deploy to any k8s cluster
The Tasks which make up a Pipeline can easily be run in isolation
Resources such as git repos can easily be swapped between runs

Tekton Pipelines are Typed:

The concept of typed resources means that for a resource such as an Image, implementations can easily be swapped out (e.g. building with kaniko v.s. buildkit)

{ 🕸 } Timoni: A possible Alternative to Helm:

Every project related to Kubernetes you explore has a helm install command in its README.

While I’m not the biggest fan of YAML, I’ve always seen it as a necessary evil - there simply wasn’t a better alternative in many cases.

But guess what? The story might take a turn in 2024. Let me introduce you to Timoni, the new member in the block for handling cloud-native applications’ distribution and lifecycle management.

What’s it bringing to the table? Well, it’s aiming to make our lives easier by introducing features like type safety, code generation, and validation into our deployments. Could this be the breath of fresh air that finally makes YAML less of a headache? Only time will tell.

At the core of these efforts is CUElang, a language designed for exactly these use cases. It’s a data definition language that allows you to define schemas and constraints for your data, and it’s used to define what Timoni calls modules.

From modules being distributed as OCI artifacts, to runtime secrets injection, to multi-cluster deployments, the project already has a lot to offer. I’m looking forward to seeing how it will evolve in 2024, and I’m excited to delve deeper into its applicable use cases and features than I did over the last months.

Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at Timoni in the coming weeks!

🚀 OpenTofu:

OpenTofu, an open source alternative to Terraform’s widely used infrastructure as code provisioning tool. Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is an open and community-driven response to Terraform’s recently announced license change from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPLv2) to a Business Source License v1.1, providing everyone with a reliable, open source alternative under a neutral governance model.

While Terraform has been instrumental in simplifying infrastructure management in cloud environments, recent licensing changes have raised concerns within the open source community. OpenTofu is an open source successor to the MPLv2-licensed Terraform that will be community-driven, impartial, layered and modular, and backward-compatible.

With broad support from industry leaders like Harness, Gruntwork, Spacelift, env0, Scalr, Digger, Terrateam, Massdriver, Terramate, and others, OpenTofu has received formal pledges spanning 140+ organizations and 600+ individuals. OpenTofu will ensure the continued development and availability of its codebase and has a starting commitment of a minimum of 18 full-time developers over at least the next five years.

🔥 Bonus: other technologies to track:

🔐 OpenBao:

OpenBao is an Open Source Fork of the HashiCorp Vault.

First Terraform, and now Vault: More open source code abandoned by HashiCorp is a finding a home with potential competitors.

In September, HashiCorp rivals forked Infrastructure as Code (IaC) software Terraform to create OpenTofu, after HashiCorp moved much of its core enterprise software from an open source to a Business Source License. Now the OpenBAO project has set out to maintain the open source version of HashiCorp’s widely used Vault security software.

The OpenTofu project quickly accumulated contributors, primarily hungry third-party Terraform-oriented startups such as Scalr, Gruntwork, Spacelift, env0, Terrateam, and Terramate, among others.

Generative AI:

Generative AI empowers creative expression by leveraging artificial intelligence algorithms to produce diverse and unique outputs, ranging from images, videos, and music to code. It involves training models to understand patterns and generate novel content based on learned information.

📺 Middleware.io:

Middleware.io is an advanced AI-powered cloud observability platform designed to streamline and enhance the monitoring and management of cloud infrastructure.

At its core, the platform employs AI algorithms to proactively detect and diagnose issues within infrastructure, applications, databases, logs, containers, and more.

This capability allows for swift identification of problems, coupled with intelligent recommendations for their resolution, thereby optimizing system performance and reliability.

✒️ Nix & NixOS:

Nix is gradually gaining popularity within the DevOps community. Though it has a steep learning curve initially, it offers significant benefits once mastered since it offers a unique approach to package management and system configuration, focusing on creating reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems.

It builds packages in isolation, ensuring that they are reproducible and free of undeclared dependencies. This feature guarantees that if a package works on one machine, it will also work on another, significantly enhancing reliability and consistency across environments.

Other key features of Nix are:

Simplifies sharing of development and build environments across multiple languages and tools.
Ensures upgrades or installations of one package don’t affect others.
Supports rollback to previous versions.
Maintains package consistency during upgrades, leading to a more stable system.

📚 Conclusion:

As we wrap up our exploration of 2024’s platform and SRE tools, one thing is clear — the tech landscape is changing fast. Staying updated is key for development and operations teams. In the upcoming year, platform engineering takes center stage, with organizations turning tools into products. AI’s significant role in SRE could revolutionize monitoring and service level objectives. Staying on top of these trends is crucial for professionals in DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering to stay competitive in 2024 and beyond.

Until next time 🇵🇸 🎉